If you missed "Flies In Danger Escape With Safety Dance," a story by NPR's Joe Palca, give it a listen. And don't forget to check out the videos which show how flies take off from a stationary position.

This kind of story puts a damper on the kind of rhetorical jabs commonly heard from Darwinists, such as, "Do we really want to make God responsible for flies and mosquitoes?" Every time someone takes the time to study one of these creatures — in this instance, scientist Michael Michael Dickinson — they come away awestruck, saying things like:

"When you see a fly flitting around your hair, or your potato salad, you might see an annoyance," he [Dickinson] says. "But in my lab you really see a marvelous machine, arguably the most sophisticated flying device on the planet."

Posted by Logan Gage at 7:12 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

In his Autobiography, Charles Darwin stated, "There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course the wind blows." It is thus quite odd that a ScienceDaily.com article earlier this year with the headline "New Findings Confirm Darwin's Theory" should go on to say "Evolution Not Random." This study may be confirming some theory, but it isn’t Darwin’s theory.

This tactic to push evolution to the public as "non-random" appears to be part of an ongoing campaign on the part of Darwinists to make neo-Darwinism appear more appealing to the public (which tends to be religious). While there are non-random components to natural selection, evolutionary biology textbooks have made it clear that other aspects of Darwinian evolution are quite random.

Last summer, Anika Smith exposed how a Newsweek science quiz claimed that Darwinian evolution was not random. According to Smith’s findings, that isn’t what recent evolutionary biology textbooks say:

I had been taught from high school biology (and again in college) that “evolution is random and undirected.” (Thank you, Ken Miller.)

Surely I'm not the only student who has ever been told that Darwinian evolution is a random process. In fact, a new textbook devoted to evolution out this year (Evolution, Nicholas Barton et al., 2007) claims that there is "extreme randomness [in] the evolutionary process" (p. 435). The point is reiterated, time and again:

Seen in detail, however, the evolutionary process is fundamentally random. (p. 413)

. . . we begin our consideration of the processes responsible for evolution by emphasizing the randomness of evolution. (p. 413, emphasis mine)

Mutation randomizes genetic information, genetic drift randomizes genotype frequencies, and gene flow randomizes the positions of genes in space. (p. 439)

Robert Ornstein’s Prentice Hall text The Evolution of Consciousness explains that mutations “are accidents” and “happen by random generation.” Ornstein concludes that we are the result of "countless historical accidents":

So here we are now, courtesy of countless historical accidents. If Australopithecus had not stood up, if the brain had not grown so rapidly … we’d not be here. … But however we got here, all our history, all our evolution, all the accidents that led to us are all over.

(Robert Ornstein, The Evolution of Consciousness: Of Darwin, Freud, and Cranial Fire-The Origins of the Way We Think, pg. 267(Prentice Hall, 1990).)

The original source for the ScienceDaily.com article (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080118134531.htm now points to ScienceDaily.com, and another location where the article was posted on NewsWise states, "This article has been withdrawn at the request of the contributor." (The original article can still be found at RichardDawkins.net.) It seems this article may have been retracted. If anything here isn’t random, it's the retraction of a mistaken article that tries to recast Darwinian evolution as something it isn’t, probably for political reasons.

Posted by Casey Luskin at 10:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Recently I documented ten examples of textbooks refuting the NCSE-scripted misinformation printed in the New York Times claiming that Ernst Haeckel's faked embryo drawings haven't been used in textbooks since "20 years ago." In fact, just last week while browsing through some science textbooks at a local thrift store, I discovered another textbook that includes Ernst Haeckel’s bogus embryo drawings.

In 1998, Judith Goodenough, Robert A. Wallace, and Betty McGuire published Human Biology: Personal, Environmental, and Social Concerns with Harcourt College Publishers. Some Darwinists (like Randy Olson) have claimed that if Haeckel’s drawings are used, it’s only to provide historical background on the history of evolutionary thought. Not so with this textbook:

Chapter 20, "Evolution: Basic Principles and Our Heritage" contains a section titled "Evidence of Evolution." A subsection of the "Evidence of Evolution" section, titled "Comparative Anatomy and Embrylogy," states that "comparative embryology, the comparative study of development, can be a useful evolutionary tool because common embryological origins can be considered evidence of common descent." It goes on to explain, "For example, 4-week old human embryos closely resemble embryos of other vertebrates, including fish with a tail and gill pouches (Figure 20-15)."

Can you guess what Figure 20-15 is? If you guessed a colorized version of Haeckel’s embryo drawings that explicitly promotes evolution without any indication that the drawing is fraudulent, you're correct! The textbook's Figure 20-15 is reprinted below:

(From Judith Goodenough, Robert A. Wallace, and Betty McGuire, Human Biology: Personal, Environmental, and Social Concerns, pg. 582 (Harcourt College Publishers, 1998). Click for full size.)

The Embryonic Hourglass Figure
An additional glaring error in last Sunday's New York Times / NCSE rebuttal on Haeckel's embryos states that "early stages (if not the earliest) of vertebrate embryos are more similar than later ones." Why is the caveat "if not the earliest" necessary? It's necessary because in the earliest stages of real vertebrate embryos, the embryos of different vertebrate classes are actually highly dissimilar:

The Embryonic Hourglass According to Richardson et al., "There is no highly conserved embryonic stage in the vertebrates: implications for current theories of evolution and development,” Anatomy and Embryology, (1997) 196:91–106.	The Embryonic Hourglass According to Jonathan Wells, Icons of Evolution: Why Much of What We Teach about Evolution is Wrong (Regnery, 2000).

The left-hand diagram is from a paper published by leading embryologists in the journal Anatomy and Embryology. In this diagram, the bottom shows how embryos begin differently, and then temporarily converge during development, only to diverge again. In fact, the whole point of the "hourglass" diagram is to show the fact that vertebrate embryos start development differently, briefly converge, and then again diverge.

The right-hand diagram shows the same thing, except the highly dissimilar forms of early embryos appear at the top, rather than the bottom. This diagram also highlights the fact that even during their "similar" pharyngular stage mid-way through development, vertebrate embryos still have important differences. More documentation can be found, here.

As can be seen, vertebrate embryos start off very differently--again making the NCSE's statement incomplete, highly misleading, and wrong.

Posted by Casey Luskin at 9:09 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

If you're looking for a summary of Benjamin Wiker's 10 Books That Screwed Up the World: And 5 Others That Didn't Help, I've tried to provide one below. The article was originally written for InsideCatholic.com.

If ever there were a book designed specifically for the enjoyment of InsideCatholic readers, surely it is Benjamin Wiker's new 10 Books that Screwed Up the World: And 5 Others that Didn't Help. Wiker should be renowned (if he is not already) for Moral Darwinism: How We Became Hedonists—a book that at once exposes both the ancient philosophical antecedents and modern cultural consequences of Darwinism.

In the present book, the professor of philosophy at Franciscan University of Steubenville proposes not a new era of book burning, as some might suppose, but rather a learned critique of toxic ideas floating in our cultural water. Wiker plays the role of EPA in the "Great Books" world, covering Machiavelli, Descartes, Hobbes, Rousseau, Marx/Engels, Mill, Darwin, Nietzsche, Lenin, Sanger, Hitler, Freud, Mead, Kinsey, and Friedan.

10 Books's two main virtues consist in exposing our often blind worship of "Science" and revealing the central mistake of the past several centuries of intellectual thought: the attempt to destroy and replace the West's traditional understanding of the human person and his place in the world.

If there is one truth our children need before college, perhaps it is...

Read the rest here.

Posted by Logan Gage at 11:08 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Dogmatists committed to a dying paradigm will argue with falsehoods to convince the public of their claims... especially when they're targeting children.

As we've covered here this week, Haeckel's faked embryo drawings are still used in science textbooks because, according to some Darwinists, "it is OK to use some inaccuracies temporarily if they help you reach the students."

That's right. According to Darwinist biology professor Bora Zivkovic, who blogs as Coturnix at A Blog Around The Clock and is Online Community Manager at PLoS-ONE, sometimes you have to lie to students in order to get them to accept evolution. Why? Because:

Education is a subversive activity that is implicitly in place in order to counter the prevailing culture. And the prevailing culture in ... many other schools in the country, is a deeply conservative religious culture.

In order to combat that "deeply conservative religious culture," Darwinists like Zivkovic push the "non-overlapping magisteria" model, or NOMA, which claims that science is about facts and religion is about values, and when we keep them in these nice separate realms, nobody gets hurt.

In reality, this scheme was designed by Darwinists in order to convince religious people that evolution is not threatening to their beliefs... the first step towards dismantling their belief system:

You cannot bludgeon kids with truth (or insult their religion, i.e., their parents and friends) and hope they will smile and believe you. Yes, NOMA is wrong, but is a good first tool for gaining trust. You have to bring them over to your side, gain their trust, and then hold their hands and help them step by step. And on that slow journey, which will be painful for many of them, it is OK to use some inaccuracies temporarily if they help you reach the students. (emphasis added)

If a student, like Natalie Wright who I quoted above, goes on to study biology, then he or she will unlearn the inaccuracies in time. If most of the students do not, but those cutesy examples help them accept evolution, then it is OK if they keep some of those little inaccuracies for the rest of their lives. It is perfectly fine if they keep thinking that Mickey Mouse evolved as long as they think evolution is fine and dandy overall. Without Mickey, they may have become Creationist activists instead. Without belief in NOMA they would have never accepted anything, and well, so be it. Better NOMA-believers than Creationists, don't you think?

Posted by Anika Smith at 12:35 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

We've covered Biologic Institute's remarkable Stylus program before; now ID the Future has an exclusive interview with Brendan Dixon, who co-developed the computer program designed to simulate evolutionary processes in proteins. From ID the Future:

Click here to listen.

In this episode of ID the Future, CSC’s Casey Luskin is joined by Brendan Dixon, a programmer with the Biologic Institute who recently coauthored a paper on his co-developed program, Stylus. Dixon explains that Stylus is a computer program that is designed to simulate evolutionary processes in proteins. It tests and applies the principles of evolution to determine what evolution can yield, what problems it can solve, and to determine what evolution can and cannot do. Using digital organisms, the program assesses protein fitness due to simulated gene mutation and based on similarities to Chinese characters. Will evolution prove capable of explaining life on earth? Listen as Dixon explains in more detail how Stylus can help us better understand and possibly answer that question.

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The NCSE's rebuttal to Jonathan Wells' Ten Questions to Ask Your Biology Teacher About Evolution, as re-published in this past Sunday's New York Times, contains some small differences from their original response which Wells refuted in 2002.

I will rebut some of the NCSE's new false claims in a couple of posts this week.

First, let’s look at the fourth question that Dr. Wells asks: "Why do textbooks use drawings of similarities in vertebrate embryos as evidence for their common ancestry — even though biologists have known for over a century that vertebrate embryos are not most similar in their early stages, and the drawings are faked?" Dr. Wells is referring to the faked embryo drawings by the 19th century embryologist Ernst Haeckel, drawings which have been repeatedly used in modern biology textbooks to promote evolution. The NCSE's 2002 response took the approach of denying that the drawings are in textbooks, stating that "hardly any textbooks feature Haeckel’s drawings, as claimed." Not only does this statement not answer Dr. Wells' question, but as will be seen below, it is blatantly false.

In the newer, slightly different response printed in the New York Times, the NCSE adds that Haeckel's drawings "were used in textbooks 20 years ago." This false claim is almost as bad as evolutionary biologist Randy Olson's claim that Haeckel's fraudulent drawings were not used in textbooks to promote evolution since 1914. What follows is documentation of 10 textbooks that have used Haeckel's embryo drawings (or near-identical colorized versions) to promote evolution in the past 10 years:

In relying upon the NCSE, the New York Times has promoted blatantly false information to the public about Haeckel's embryo drawings in textbooks. Many biology textbooks within the past 10 years even have used Haeckel's embryo drawings to promote evolution, just as Jonathan Wells claimed.

Posted by Casey Luskin at 7:10 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

[Editor's Note: The following article was written by Jonathan Wells and published in 2002.]

According to the NCSE, many of the claims in my questions "are incorrect or misleading," and they are "intended only to create unwarranted doubts in students' minds about the validity of evolution as good science." It is actually the NCSE's answers, however, that are incorrect or misleading. My original questions (in italics) are posted below; each question is followed by the NCSE's answer (in bold), a brief outline of my response, and then my detailed response. Numbers in parentheses refer to research notes at the end.

Please feel free to copy and distribute this document to teachers, students, parents, and other interested parties.

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My Question: ORIGIN OF LIFE. Why do textbooks claim that the 1953 Miller-Urey experiment shows how life’s building blocks may have formed on the early Earth--when conditions on the early Earth were probably nothing like those used in the experiment, and the origin of life remains a mystery?

NCSE’s Answer: Because evolutionary theory works with any model of the origin of life on Earth, how life originated is not a question about evolution. Textbooks discuss the 1953 studies because they were the first successful attempt to show how organic molecules might have been produced on the early Earth. When modern scientists changed the experimental conditions to reflect better knowledge of the Earth’s early atmosphere, they were able to produce most of the same building blocks. Origin-of-life remains a vigorous area of research.

My Response in Outline:

(a) Most biology textbooks include the origin of life--and the Miller-Urey experiment--in their treatments of evolution. If the NCSE feels that the origin of life is really “not a question about evolution,” the organization should launch a campaign to correct biology textbooks.

(b) Because the Miller-Urey experiment used a simulated atmosphere that geochemists now agree was incorrect, it was not the “first successful attempt to show how organic molecules might have been produced on the early Earth.” When conditions are changed to reflect better knowledge of the Earth’s early atmosphere, the experiment doesn’t work.

(c) If the origin of life “remains a vigorous area of research,” it is only because origin-of-life researchers are dedicated to their work, not because they have discovered anything that demonstrates how life originated.

My Response in Detail:

(a) The NCSE’s claim that the origin of life is “not a question about evolution” ignores the fact that most biology textbooks include it--along with the Miller-Urey experiment--in their treatments of evolution. For example, Campbell, Reece and Mitchell’s Biology (5th Edition, 1999), one of the most widely used introductory textbooks for college undergraduates, discusses the Miller-Urey experiment in “Unit Five: The Evolutionary History of Biological Diversity.” Similarly, Mader’s Biology (6th Edition, 1998), Starr and Taggart’s Biology: The Unity and Diversity of Life (8th Edition, 1998), Schraer and Stoltze’s Biology: The Study of Life (7th Edition, 1999), Guttman’s Biology (1999), Audesirk, Audesirk and Byers’s Life On Earth (2nd Edition, 2000), and Purves, Sadava, Orians and Heller’s Life: The Science of Biology (6th Edition, 2001) all feature the Miller-Urey experiment in their sections dealing with evolution. Alberts, Bray, Lewis, Raff, Roberts and Watson’s upper-division textbook for biology majors, Molecular Biology of the Cell (3rd Edition, 1994), discusses it in a chapter titled “Evolution of the Cell.” The Miller-Urey experiment is also standard fare in upper division and graduate-level textbooks devoted entirely to evolution, such as Futuyma’s Evolutionary Biology (3rd Edition, 1998) and Freeman and Herron’s Evolutionary Analysis (2nd Edition, 2001). If the NCSE feels that the origin of life is really “not a question about evolution,” the organization should launch a campaign to correct biology textbooks.¹

(b) The 1953 Miller-Urey experiment used a simulated hydrogen-rich atmosphere of methane, ammonia, hydrogen and water vapor. By 1970, however, geochemists were nearly unanimous in agreeing that the Earth’s primitive atmosphere was nothing like this. Excess hydrogen is quickly lost to space because the Earth’s gravity is too weak to hold it, so the early atmosphere would almost certainly have consisted of gasses emitted from volcanoes--mainly carbon dioxide, nitrogen and water vapor. When this more realistic mixture is put into a Miller-Urey-type apparatus, the experiment doesn’t work. Stanley Miller himself reported in 1983 that the most he could produce in the absence of methane was glycine, the simplest amino acid, and then only if free hydrogen were present. But free hydrogen is precisely what geochemists now agree was essentially ABSENT. So the Miller-Urey experiment was unsuccessful, and NCSE’s claim that it was the “first successful attempt to show how organic molecules might have been produced on the early Earth” is false. The NCSE’s claim that “when modern scientists changed the experimental conditions to reflect better knowledge of the Earth’s early atmosphere, they were able to produce most of the same building blocks” is also false. ²

(c) If the origin of life “remains a vigorous area of research,” it is only because origin-of-life researchers are dedicated to their work, not because they have discovered anything that demonstrates how life originated. As New York Times science reporter Nicholas Wade wrote in 2000: “Everything about the origin of life on Earth is a mystery, and it seems the more that is known, the more acute the puzzles get.” ³

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My Question: DARWIN’S TREE OF LIFE. Why don’t textbooks discuss the “Cambrian explosion,” in which all major animal groups appear together in the fossil record fully formed instead of branching from a common ancestor--thus contradicting the evolutionary tree of life?

NCSE’s Answer: Wells is wrong: fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals all are post-Cambrian--aren’t these “major groups”? We would recognize very few of the Cambrian organisms as “modern”; they are in fact at the roots of the tree of life, showing the earliest appearances of some key features of groups of animals--but not all features and not all groups. Researchers are linking these Cambrian groups using not only fossils but also data from developmental biology.

My Response in Outline:

(a) The NCSE is wrong: Fish DID make their first appearance in the Cambrian explosion.

(b) The “major groups” to which my question refers are the animal phyla. Fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals are sub-groups (classes) of a single phylum. The NCSE is using semantics to give the illusion that the Cambrian explosion never happened.

(c) It is through assumption and extrapolation, not “fossils” and “data from developmental biology,” that Darwinists are supposedly “linking” the Cambrian groups.

My Response in Detail:

(a) The fossil record shows that fish were among the animals that made their first appearance in the Cambrian explosion.⁴

(b) Fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals are not the “major groups” to which my question refers. As every biologist knows, animals are classified into a hierarchy of groups: species, genera, families, orders, classes, and phyla. The phyla are the several dozen major categories that distinguish mollusks, arthropods, echinoderms, annelids and chordates, among others. (Modern representatives of the five phyla listed include snails, insects, starfish, earthworms and mammals, respectively.) Fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals are sub-groups (classes) of the chordate phylum. Since fish first appeared in the early Cambrian, this phylum was present in the Cambrian explosion, even though not all of its sub-groups were. Representatives of the five phyla listed here, and most of the other phyla as well--the “major groups” of animals recognized by all biologists--appear in the Cambrian explosion, with no fossil evidence that they evolved from a common ancestor. Berkeley paleontologist James Valentine and his colleagues wrote in 1991 that the Cambrian explosion “was even more abrupt and extensive than previously envisioned” and gives the impression that animal evolution “has by and large proceeded from the ‘top down’.” This does not fit Darwin’s theory that major differences should have evolved over millions of years from minor differences in a single ancestral species--that is, from the “bottom up.” By labeling vertebrate classes “major groups,” the NCSE uses a semantic trick to give the illusion that the Cambrian explosion never happened, and that the conflict with Darwin’s theory doesn’t exist. Similarly, most biology textbooks avoid any mention of the Cambrian explosion, and the few that do mention it try to dismiss it. The NCSE, like the textbooks, is concealing a problem with the fossil record so significant that Darwin himself considered it a “valid argument” against his theory. ⁵

(c) The NCSE’s claim that “researchers are linking these Cambrian groups using not only fossils but also data from developmental biology” is profoundly misleading. First, the principal lesson of the Cambrian explosion is that the fossils needed for “linking” the phyla to a common ancestor are nonexistent. Second, with a few rare exceptions developmental data are available only from living animals. Although embryological similarities and differences can help us to classify living animals into phyla, we can only speculate how most extinct animals developed. Darwinian researchers ASSUME the existence of a common ancestor, and then extrapolate modern similarities and differences hundreds of millions of years into the past to guess what the hypothetical ancestor might have been or how it might have developed. Thus it is through assumption and extrapolation, not “fossils” and “data from developmental biology,” that Darwinists are “linking” the Cambrian groups.

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My Question: HOMOLOGY. Why do textbooks define homology as similarity due to common ancestry, then claim that it is evidence for common ancestry--a circular argument masquerading as scientific evidence?

NCSE’s Answer: The same anatomical structure (such as a leg or an antenna) in two species may be similar because it was inherited from a common ancestor (homology) or because of similar adaptive pressure (convergence). Homology of structures across species is not assumed, but tested by the repeated comparison of numerous features that do or do not sort into successive clusters. Homology is used to test hypotheses of degrees of relatedness. Homology is not “evidence” for common ancestry: common ancestry is inferred based on many sources of information, and reinforced by the patterns of similarity and dissimilarity of anatomical structures.

My Response in Outline:

(a) I thank the NCSE for conceding my main point: Homology (defined by modern Darwinists as similarity due to common ancestry) is not evidence of common ancestry.

(b) Yet many biology textbooks tell students that it is. When the NCSE launches its campaign to correct textbooks that treat the origin of life as part of evolution, it should also correct textbooks that treat homology as evidence for common ancestry.

(c) At the level of the animal phyla, common ancestry is not inferred from “sources of information” such as fossils, molecules or embryos; instead, it is assumed on theoretical grounds.

My Response in Detail:

(a) As the NCSE acknowledges, homology (defined by modern Darwinists as similarity due to common ancestry) is not evidence of common ancestry.

(b) Why, then, do many biology textbooks tell students that homology is evidence of common ancestry? For example, Starr and Taggart’s Biology: The Unity and Diversity of Life (8th Edition, 1998), states that the “pattern of macroevolution — that is, change from the form of a common ancestor — is called morphological divergence…. Homology [is] a similarity in one or more body parts in different organisms that share a common ancestor…. Homologous structures provide very strong evidence of morphological divergence.” In a section on “The Evidence for Evolution” in the teacher’s edition of Johnson’s Biology: Visualizing Life (1998), students are told that “homologous structures are structures that share a common ancestor,” and an accompanying note tells the teacher that “such structures point to a common ancestry.” According to Campbell, Reece and Mitchell’s Biology(5th Edition, 1999), “similarity in characteristics resulting from common ancestry is known as homology, and such anatomical signs of evolution are called homologous structures. Comparative anatomy is consistent with all other evidence in testifying [to] evolution.” Raven and Johnson’s Biology (5th Edition, 1999), in a section titled “The evidence for macroevolution is extensive,” includes the following: “Homology: Many organisms exhibit organs that are similar in structure to those in a recent common ancestor. This is evidence of evolutionary relatedness.” A few pages later, the same textbook explicitly defines homologous structures as “structures with different appearances and functions that all derived from the same body part in a common ancestor.” Audesirk, Audesirk and Byers’s Life On Earth (2nd Edition, 2000) calls homology “evidence of relatedness” in a section titled “Comparative Anatomy Provides Structural Evidence of Evolution.” The textbook tells students: “Internally similar structures are called homologous structures, meaning that they have the same evolutionary origin despite possible differences in function. Studies of comparative anatomy have long been used to determine the relationships among organisms, on the grounds that the more similar the internal structures of two species, the more closely related the species must be, that is, the more recently they must have diverged from a common ancestor.” When the NCSE launches its campaign to correct textbooks that treat the origin of life as part of evolution, it should also correct textbooks that treat homology as evidence for common ancestry. ⁶

(c) According to the NCSE, “common ancestry is inferred based on many sources of evidence.” As we have seen, however, at the level of the animal phyla the fossil record does not support such an inference. Neither does the molecular evidence. As biologist Michael Lynch wrote in 1999: “Clarification of the phylogenetic [i.e., evolutionary] relationships of the major animal phyla has been an elusive problem, with analyses based on different genes and even different analyses based on the same genes yielding a diversity of phylogenetic trees.” And as the next question demonstrates, the embryological evidence does not support common ancestry even at the level of the vertebrate classes, much less at the phylum level. At these levels, common ancestry is assumed on theoretical grounds, not inferred from evidence. ⁷

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My Question: VERTEBRATE EMBRYOS. Why do textbooks use drawings of similarities in vertebrate embryos as evidence for their common ancestry--even though biologists have known for over a century that vertebrate embryos are not most similar in their early stages, and the drawings are faked?

NCSE’s Answer: Twentieth-century and current embryological research confirms that early stages (if not the earliest) of vertebrate embryos are more similar than later ones; the more recently species shared a common ancestor, the more similar their embryological development. Thus cows and rabbits--mammals--are more similar in their embryological development than either is to alligators. Cows and antelopes are more similar in their embryology than either is to rabbits, and so on. The union of evolution and developmental biology--”evo-devo”--is one of the most rapidly growing biological fields. “Faked” drawings are not relied upon: there has been plenty of research in developmental biology since Haeckel--and in fact, hardly any textbooks feature Haeckel’s drawings, as claimed.

My Response in Outline:

(a) Far from confirming the NCSE’s claim that the early stages of vertebrate embryos are more similar than later ones, embryological research confirms that the claim is false.

(b) The NCSE’s claim that “the more recently species shared a common ancestor, the more similar their embryological development” is also false.

(c) Textbooks claim that the various CLASSES of vertebrates resemble each other in their early stages. By focusing on taxonomic levels below classes, the NCSE is attempting to evade the issue.

(d) Although the NCSE claims that “faked” drawings “are not relied upon,” a simple examination of biology textbooks shows that the NCSE is wrong.

My Response in Detail:

(a) Contrary to the NCSE’s claim, the early stages of vertebrate embryos are generally NOT more similar than later ones. Early vertebrate embryos actually look very different from each other, then they converge somewhat in appearance midway through development before diverging again--a pattern known to embryologists as the “developmental hourglass.” Birds and mammals, for example, have fundamentally different patterns of early cell divisions (called “cleavage”), yet the two classes look somewhat similar for a short time midway through development. In the 1860’s, German Darwinist Ernst Haeckel produced drawings of vertebrate embryos that not only exaggerated their similarities at the midpoint of development, but also omitted the strikingly different stages that preceded the midpoint. The drawings gave the impression that vertebrate embryos are most similar in their early stages, suggesting common ancestry; but the drawings were faked, and the impression is false. In 1976, embryologist William Ballard wrote that it is “only by semantic tricks and subjective selection of evidence,” by “bending the facts of nature,” that one can argue that the cleavage and gastrulation stages of vertebrates “are more alike than their adults.” (Gastrulation refers to the cell movements that follow the cleavage stage.) In 1987, developmental biologist Richard Elinson noted that the early embryos of frogs, chicks and mice “are radically different in such fundamental properties as egg size, fertilization mechanisms, cleavage patterns, and [gastrulation] movements.” Thus “twentieth-century and current embryological research” confirms that the NCSE is wrong.⁸

(b) The NCSE further claims that “the more recently species shared a common ancestor, the more similar their embryological development.” As a general description of vertebrate embryos, however, this is also false. For example, the pattern of development in some frog species looks very much like that in birds, but no one thinks those frogs are more closely related to birds than to other frogs.⁹

(c) The standard textbook claim is that the various CLASSES of vertebrates resemble each other in their early stages. Yet in its answer, the NCSE compares representatives of only one class, mammals. No one doubts that the embryos of mammals tend to resemble each other more than they resemble the embryos of reptiles, but Haeckel’s drawings fraudulently portrayed the embryos of ALL vertebrate classes as though they were alike. Just as the NCSE evaded my question about the “tree of life” by focusing on classes instead of phyla, here the NCSE evades my question about vertebrate embryos by focusing on taxonomic levels below classes. The NCSE thereby resorts to exactly the sort of “semantic tricks and subjective selection of evidence” criticized by Ballard in 1976.

(d) According to the NCSE, “faked” drawings “are not relied upon,” and “hardly any textbooks feature Haeckel’s drawings.” Yet two college textbooks, Starr and Taggart’s Biology: The Unity and Diversity of Life (8th Edition, 1998) and Guttman’s Biology (1999) feature slightly redrawn versions of Haeckel’s faked originals. Three high-school textbooks, Biggs, Kapicka and Lundgren’s Biology: The Dynamics of Life (1998), Schraer and Stoltze’s Biology: The Study of Life (7th Edition, 1999), and Miller and Levine’s Biology (5th Edition, 2000), contain stylized drawings that improve only slightly on Haeckel, and perpetuate Haeckel’s misrepresentation of the midpoint of development as the first stage. Worse yet, two advanced textbooks for college biology majors feature Haeckel’s original drawings: Alberts, Bray, Lewis, Raff, Roberts and Watson’s Molecular Biology of the Cell (3rd Edition, 1994), and Futuyma’s Evolutionary Biology (3rd Edition, 1998). It was textbooks like these that prompted Harvard evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould to write in 2000: “We do, I think, have the right to be both astonished and ashamed by the century of mindless recycling that has led to the persistence of these drawings in a large number, if not a majority, of modern textbooks.” ¹⁰

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My Question: ARCHAEOPTERYX. Why do textbooks portray this fossil as the missing link between dinosaurs and modern birds--even though modern birds are probably not descended from it, and its supposed ancestors do not appear until millions of years after it?

NCSE’s Answer: The notion of a “missing link” is an out-of-date misconception about how evolution works. Archaeopteryx (and other feathered fossils) shows how a branch of reptiles gradually acquired both the unique anatomy and flying adaptations found in all modern birds. It is a transitional fossil in that it shows both reptile ancestry and bird specializations. Wells’s claim that “supposed ancestors” are younger than Archaeopteryx is false. These fossils are not ancestors but relatives of Archaeopteryx and, as everyone knows, your uncle can be younger than you!

My Response in Outline:

(a) If the notion of a “missing link” is out of date, why do biology textbooks continue to use it? When the NCSE launches its long-overdue campaign against misconceptions in biology textbooks (such as calling the origin of life part of evolution, or using homology as evidence for common ancestry), it can add “missing link” to its list.

(b) If Darwin’s theory is true, there must have been organisms in the past that were transitional links between ancestors and descendants--yet most of them are missing from the fossil record. So the notion of “missing link” is no more “out-of-date” than evolutionary theory itself.

(c) Archaeopteryx is not preceded by fossils showing how reptiles “gradually acquired” bird-like features. Furthermore, without fossils of the appropriate age, the NCSE has no grounds for saying “Wells’s claim that ‘supposed ancestors’ are younger than Archaeopteryx is false.”

(d) Bird-like dinosaurs are not just younger than their supposed relative, but millions of generations younger, so it makes no sense to call them “uncles” of Archaeopteryx.

My Response in Detail:

(a) Many biology textbooks call Archaeopteryx a “link” that once was missing but now is found. Starr and Taggart’s Biology: The Unity and Diversity of Life (8th Edition, 1998) calls Archaeopteryx “the first of the ‘missing links’.” Mader’s Biology (6th Edition, 1998), describes this fossil as “a transitional link between reptiles and modern birds.” Schraer and Stoltze’s Biology: The Study of Life (7th Edition, 1999) calls it “an evolutionary link between reptiles and birds.” And according to Raven and Johnson’s Biology (5th Edition, 1999), Archaeopteryx is an example of a fossil “linking” major groups. If the NCSE ever launches a campaign against misconceptions in biology textbooks (such as calling the origin of life part of evolution, or using homology as evidence for common ancestry), it can add “missing link” to its list. ¹¹

(b) In any case, the NCSE’s claim that “missing link” is a misconception is odd, since if Darwin’s theory is true there MUST have been organisms in the past that were transitional links between ancestors and descendants. Transitional links are a logical consequence of evolutionary theory, yet most of them are missing from the fossil record. Archaeopteryx is famous precisely because it is one of the few supposed links that have been found. So the notion of “missing link” cannot possibly be any more “out-of-date” than evolutionary theory itself. Of course, whether any PARTICULAR fossil can be determined to be a transitional link is open to serious doubt. According to Henry Gee, chief science writer for Nature, “the intervals of time that separate fossils are so huge that we cannot say anything definite about their possible connection through ancestry and descent.” But if the NCSE is suggesting, like Gee, that NO fossil can be identified as transitional between its ancestors and descendants, why does it call Archaeopteryx a “transitional fossil” that shows “reptilian ancestry” as well as bird-like features? ¹²

(c) Archaeopteryx is the oldest bird in the fossil record. It appears fully formed, and it is not preceded by fossils showing gradual transitions from reptiles to birds. So the NCSE’s claim that it shows “how a branch of reptiles gradually acquired” bird-like features is false. If the NCSE is suggesting that this gradual transition is seen in bird-like dinosaurs (a view passionately--and controversially--defended by NCSE’s president, Kevin Padian), the problem is that these supposed ancestors do not appear in the fossil record until tens of millions of years AFTER Archaeopteryx. Without fossils of the appropriate age, the NCSE has no grounds for saying “Wells’s claim that ‘supposed ancestors’ are younger than Archaeopteryx is false.” ¹³

(d) Calling bird-like dinosaurs “uncles” instead of “ancestors” of Archaeopteryx merely obscures the problem: Although an uncle isn’t the ancestor of his nephew, and the former can be younger than the latter, the two--by definition--are no more than a generation apart, and they are members of the same species. Yet according to the fossil record, Archaeopteryx is millions of generations older than the bird-like dinosaurs. Furthermore, the two are not in the same species--in fact, they’re not even in the same genus, family, order or class! It makes no sense to call David Ben-Gurion the “uncle” of Abraham--much less to call bird-like dinosaurs the “uncles” of Archaeopteryx.

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My Question: PEPPERED MOTHS. Why do textbooks use pictures of peppered moths camouflaged on tree trunks as evidence for natural selection--when biologists have known since the 1980s that the moths don’t normally rest on tree trunks, and all the pictures have been staged?

NCSE’s Answer: These pictures are illustrations used to demonstrate a point--the advantage of protective coloration to reduce the danger of predation. The pictures are not the scientific evidence used to prove the point in the first place. Compare this illustration to the well-known re-enactments of the Battle of Gettysburg. Does the fact that these re-enactments are staged prove that the battle never happened? The peppered moth photos are the same sort of illustration, not scientific evidence for natural selection.

My Response in Outline:

(a) The NCSE’s first point is technically correct: The textbook pictures are illustrations, not actual evidence.

(b) The NCSE is using this technical point, however, to obscure the real issue: The textbook pictures misrepresent the natural resting-place of peppered moths and conceal serious flaws in the standard story.

(c) Staged peppered moth photos are not comparable to re-enactments of the Battle of Gettysburg, because the former misrepresent the truth.

(d) If using staged photos and re-telling a flawed story “demonstrate a point,” as the NCSE claims, the point is that students cannot trust what they read in their biology textbooks.

My Response in Detail:

a) True, the textbook pictures are illustrations, not actual evidence. It would have been more accurate for me to write “examples of” or “illustrations of” instead of “evidence for.”

(b) The NCSE uses this technical point, however, to obscure the fact that textbook pictures misrepresent the evidence and conceal serious flaws in the peppered moth story. Two hundred years ago, almost all peppered moths in the U.K. were light-colored. During the industrial revolution, dark-colored moths became much more common--especially in the polluted woodlands around major cities. According to theory, the shift occurred because dark-colored moths were better camouflaged against pollution-darkened tree trunks, and thus less likely to be eaten by predatory birds. In the 1950’s, Bernard Kettlewell released light and dark-colored moths onto nearby tree trunks in polluted and unpolluted woodlands, and watched as birds ate the more visible ones. The story, and Kettlewell’s experiments, became the classic textbook example of natural selection. When pollution-control legislation resulted in cleaner air after the 1950s, light-colored moths became more common again, as the theory predicted. Contrary to the theory, however, this occurred BEFORE tree trunks reverted to their former light color. In the 1980s, biologists discovered that peppered moths don’t normally rest on tree trunks, and many began to question the classic story about camouflage and bird predation. In 1998, Theodore Sargent, Craig Millar and David Lambert wrote in Evolutionary Biology: “There is little persuasive evidence… to support this explanation at the present time.” And as University of Chicago evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne wrote in Nature, the fact that peppered moths do not normally rest on tree trunks “alone invalidates Kettlewell’s… experiments, as moths were released by placing them directly onto tree trunks.” ¹⁴

(c) The NCSE’s comparison of staged peppered moth photos with re-enactments of the Battle of Gettysburg is inappropriate, because the former misrepresent the facts. The appropriate comparison would be with FALSE re-enactments of the Battle of Gettysburg--such as re-enactments staged in Chancellorsville (where the other side won). Scientific illustrations, like historical re-enactments, should portray the truth.

(d) Instead of telling students the truth about peppered moths, most biology textbooks repeat the classic story and illustrate it with staged pictures--many of them made by pinning or gluing dead moths to tree trunks. For example, Johnson’s Biology: Visualizing Life (1998), Guttman’s Biology (1999), Schraer and Stoltze’s Biology: The Study of Life (7th Edition, 1999), and Miller and Levine’s Biology (5th Edition, 2000) all use staged photos and summaries of Kettlewell’s experiments to convince students that peppered moths are a classic demonstration of natural selection in action. Mader’s Biology (6th Edition, 1998) goes even further, using Kettlewell’s experiments as the paramount example of how to do science: “The scientific method consists of forming a hypothesis, testing it, and coming to an conclusion…. In order to examine the scientific method in more detail, we will consider research performed by British scientist H.B.D. Kettlewell.” If these illustrations “demonstrate a point,” as the NCSE claims, the point is that students cannot trust what they read in their biology textbooks.¹⁵

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My Question: DARWIN’S FINCHES. Why do textbooks claim that beak changes in Galápagos finches during a severe drought can explain the origin of species by natural selection--even though the changes were reversed after the drought ended, and no net evolution occurred?

NCSE’s Answer: Textbooks present the finch data to illustrate natural selection: that populations change their physical features in response to changes in the environment. The finch studies carefully--exquisitely--documented how the physical features of an organism can affect its success in reproduction and survival, and that such changes can take place more quickly than was realized. That new species did not arise within the duration of the study hardly challenges evolution!

My Response in Outline:

(a) The NCSE is evading the question, which is not whether the finch data demonstrate natural selection (they do), but whether those data explain the origin of new species (they don’t).

(b) To the extent that scientific theories are supposed to rely on evidence, the finch study DOES challenge Darwin’s theory of the origin of species by natural selection. No one doubts that natural selection occurs, but every time it has been observed (as in the finches) it has occurred only within existing species.

My Response in Detail:

(a) The question is not whether the finch data demonstrate natural selection, but whether those data explain the origin of new species. In the 1970s, biologists Peter and Rosemary Grant watched as a severe drought killed 85% of a particular finch species on one island in the Galápagos archipelago. The survivors had (on average) slightly larger beaks, enabling them to crack the hard seeds that had weathered the drought; but average beak size returned to normal after the rains returned. There was no net change, and no new species emerged. In fact, several species of Galápagos finches now appear to be merging through hybridization--the exact opposite of producing new species. Yet some textbooks--and a publication of the U. S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS)--make it sound as though the finch studies showed how new species can originate. Miller and Levine’s Biology: The Living Science (1998) tells students: “It might take only between 12 and 20 droughts to change one species of finch into another!” According to Science and Creationism: A View from the National Academy of Sciences (1999), the Grants’ observations showed that “if droughts occur about once every ten years on the islands, a new species of finch might arise in only about 200 years,” making the Galápagos finches “a particularly compelling example of speciation [a technical term for the origin of new species].” Both the Miller-Levine textbook and the NAS booklet neglect to mention that the data actually point to oscillating selection with no net change, and now to the merging of species through hybridization. The question is not whether the Grants observed natural selection--they did--but why the evidence is exaggerated to make it appear to show much more. The NCSE fails to answer this question.¹⁶

(b) The fact that no new species arose in the course of the Grants’ study does not refute the theory of evolution. It certainly “challenges” it, however, because scientific theories need to be supported by evidence. Darwin’s theory, as expressed in the title of his 1859 book, was The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, and the Galápagos finches are held up by our nation’s premier science organization as a “particularly compelling example” of this. Yet the finch data do not show cumulative changes in beak size, much less the origin of species through natural selection. No one doubts that natural selection occurs, but every time it has been observed (as in the finches) it has occurred within existing species. For example, natural selection has often been observed in bacteria. Because of their rapid generation times, bacteria ought to be the easiest organisms in which to observe the origin of species through natural selection. Yet as British bacteriologist Alan H. Linton wrote in 2001: “Throughout 150 years of the science of bacteriology, there is no evidence that one species of bacteria has changed into another.” Faced with this lack of evidence for a key element of Darwin’s theory, some defenders of the theory--even in the prestigious NAS--have taken to exaggerating the finch data. Although this does not refute the theory, it hardly inspires confidence in it. As Berkeley law professor and Darwin critic Phillip E. Johnson wrote in 1999: “When our leading scientists have to resort to the sort of distortion that would land a stock promoter in jail, you know they are in trouble.” ¹⁷

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My Question: MUTANT FRUIT FLIES. Why do textbooks use fruit flies with an extra pair of wings as evidence that DNA mutations can supply raw materials for evolution--even though the extra wings have no muscles and these disabled mutants cannot survive outside the laboratory?

NCSE’s Answer: In the very few textbooks that discuss four-winged fruit flies, they are used as an illustration of how genes can reprogram parts of the body to produce novel structures, thus indeed providing “raw material” for evolution. This type of mutation produces new structures that become available for further experimentation and potential new uses. Even if not every mutation leads to a new evolutionary pathway, the flies are a vivid example of one way mutation can provide variation for natural selection to work on.

My Response in Outline:

(a) The four-winged fruit fly is found in a lot more than “very few” textbooks.

(b) The mutations that produce the four-winged fruit fly lead to the LOSS of important structures--and to their replacement by duplicates of structures already present elsewhere in the fly--not to “new structures that become available for further experimentation.”

(c) Mutations must be advantageous to the organism in order to provide raw materials for evolution--otherwise, natural selection will tend to eliminate them. Yet the four-winged fruit fly is seriously disabled, so it is not “a vivid example of one way mutation can provide variation for natural selection to work on.”

My Response in Detail:

(a) More than a few textbooks use the four-winged fruit fly. Mader’s Biology 6th Edition, 1998), Raven and Johnson’s Biology (5th Edition, 1999), Guttman’s Biology (1999) and Purves, Sadava, Orians and Heller’s Life: The Science of Biology (6th Edition, 2001) all use pictures of four-winged fruit flies to illustrate how mutations can affect development--after telling students that gene mutations are the raw materials of evolution. Two advanced textbooks for biology majors, Futuyma’s Evolutionary Biology (3rd Edition, 1998) and Freeman and Herron’s Evolutionary Analysis (2nd Edition, 2001), include pictures of four-winged fruit flies in their discussions of how mutations supposedly provide raw materials for evolution.¹⁸

(b) Contrary to the NCSE’s claim, the extra wings in the four-winged fruit fly are not “novel structures,” but pathological duplications of body parts already present elsewhere in the fly. The mutations that produce the four-winged fly damage a gene that normally enables the fly to develop “balancers”--tiny structures behind the wings that help to stabilize the insect in flight. Unable to form balancers, the mutant fly sprouts a second pair of normal-looking (though not normal-functioning) wings by default. In other words, the mutations lead to a LOSS of important structures, not to “new structures that become available for further experimentation.” ¹⁹

(c) In order for a mutation to provide raw materials for evolution, it must be advantageous to the organism--otherwise, natural selection will tend to eliminate it. Although most mutations are harmful, a mutation occasionally benefits an organism by increasing its resistance to an antibiotic or a pesticide--usually by damaging a molecule that would otherwise react with the antibiotic or pesticide. Such mutations, however, affect only single molecules, while Darwinian evolution requires changes in anatomy as well as biochemistry. But advantageous anatomical mutations are never observed. The four-winged fruit fly is a case in point: The second set of wings lacks flight muscles, so the useless appendages interfere with flying and mating, and the mutant fly cannot survive long outside the laboratory. Similar mutations in other genes also produce various anatomical deformations, but they are harmful, too. In 1963, Harvard evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr wrote that the resulting mutants “are such evident freaks that these monsters can be designated only as ‘hopeless.’ They are so utterly unbalanced that they would not have the slightest chance of escaping elimination” through natural selection. So the NCSE’s claim that four-winged fruit flies “are a vivid example of one way mutation can provide variation for natural selection to work on” is false.²⁰

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My Question: HUMAN ORIGINS. Why are artists’ drawings of ape-like humans used to justify materialistic claims that we are just animals and our existence is a mere accident--when fossil experts cannot even agree on who our supposed ancestors were or what they looked like?

NCSE’s Answer: Drawings of humans and our ancestors illustrate the general outline of human ancestry, about which there is considerable agreement, even if new discoveries continually add to the complexity of the account. The notion that such drawings are used to “justify materialistic claims” is ludicrous and not borne out by an examination of textbook treatments of human evolution.

My Response in Outline:

(a) The field of human origins is actually one of the most contentious in biology, because individual researchers interpret the relatively meager evidence on the basis of different biases and preconceptions.

(b) Darwin’s followers--like Darwin himself--agree that humans evolved from ape-like animals. This theoretical consensus, however, owes less to the evidence than to materialistic philosophy.

(c) One consequence of this philosophy is the claim that there has been no purpose or direction in the history of life. Many biology textbooks promote this view and use drawings of ape-like humans to convince students that we are no exception to it.

My Response in Detail:

(a) Contrary the NCSE’s claim of “considerable agreement,” the field of human origins (paleoanthropology) is actually one of the most contentious in biology. According to experts in the field, this is because of subjective interpretations of the relatively meager evidence. Berkeley evolutionary biologist F. Clark Howell wrote in 1996: “There is no encompassing theory of [human] evolution... Alas, there never really has been.” According to Howell, the field is characterized by “narrative treatments” based on little evidence, so “it is probably true that an encompassing scenario” of human evolution “is beyond our grasp, now if not forever.” Arizona State University paleoanthropologist Geoffrey Clark was equally pessimistic in 1997: “Scientists have been trying to arrive at a consensus about modern human origins for more than a century. Why haven’t they been successful?” Clark is convinced it is because paleoanthropologists proceed from different “biases, preconceptions and assumptions.” And in 1999 Henry Gee, chief science writer for Nature, pointed out that all the evidence for human evolution “between about 10 and 5 million years ago--several thousand generations of living creatures--can be fitted into a small box.” According to Gee, the conventional picture of human evolution as lines of ancestry and descent is “a completely human invention created after the fact, shaped to accord with human prejudices.” ²¹

(b) Of course, Darwin’s followers--like Darwin himself--agree that humans evolved from ape-like animals. This agreement, however, represents a theoretical consensus. It does not emerge from the evidence--not the meager evidence for human origins, nor (as we have seen) the evidence from four-winged fruit flies, Darwin’s finches, peppered moths, vertebrate embryos, comparative anatomy, or the fossil record of the animal phyla. On what, then, is this theoretical consensus based?

(c) It seems to me that it is based largely on a philosophical commitment--specifically, a commitment to materialism, the philosophical doctrine that the physical universe is the only reality; God, spirit and mind are illusions. One consequence of this doctrine is the claim that there has been no purpose or direction in the history of life. According to the NCSE, the notion that textbooks use drawings of supposed human ancestors to justify this claim is “ludicrous.” Yet Guttman’s Biology (1999) tells students that living things have developed “just by chance,” by a roll of the “cosmic dice,” through “the action of random evolutionary forces.” Miller and Levine’s Biology (5th Edition, 2000) asserts that “evolution works without plan or purpose,” so “evolution is random and undirected.” Purves, Sadava, Orians and Heller’s Life: The Science of Biology (6th Edition, 2001) states that “evolution is not directed toward a final goal or state.” And all three of these textbooks include fanciful drawings of ape-like humans that help to convince students we are no exception to the rule of purposelessness.

Some biology textbooks use other kinds of illustrations as well as interviews with famous Darwinists to persuade students that human beings are merely accidental by-products of purposeless natural processes. Raven and Johnson’s Biology (5th Edition, 1999) depicts a speculative reconstruction of the famous “Lucy” fossil after treating students to an interview with Harvard professor Stephen Jay Gould, who tells them: “Humans represent just one tiny, largely fortuitous, and late-arising twig on the enormously arborescent bush of life.” Campbell, Reece and Mitchell’s Biology (5th Edition, 1999) uses drawings of reconstructed fossil skulls rather than whole animals, and features an interview with Oxford professor Richard Dawkins, who declares: “Natural selection is a bewilderingly simple idea. And yet what it explains is the whole of life, the diversity of life, the complexity of life, the apparent design of life”--including human beings, who “are fundamentally not exceptional because we came from the same evolutionary source as every other species.” Our existence was not planned, however, because natural selection is “totally blind to the future”--the “blind watchmaker.” For further reading, students are referred to Dawkins’s book of that name, in which he writes: “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.” ²²

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My Question: EVOLUTION A FACT? Why are we told that Darwin’s theory of evolution is a scientific fact--even though many of its claims are based on misrepresentations of the facts?

NCSE’s Answer: What does Wells mean by “Darwin’s theory of evolution”? In the last century, some of what Darwin originally proposed has been augmented by more modern scientific understanding of inheritance (genetics), development, and other processes that affect evolution. What remains unchanged is that similarities and differences among living things on Earth over time and space display a pattern that is best explained by evolutionary theory. Wells’s “10 Questions” fails to demonstrate a pattern of evolutionary biologists’ “misrepresenting the facts.”

My Response in Outline:

(a) Darwin called his theory “descent with modification.” Defenders of the theory often refer to descent from a common ancestor as a “fact,” and reserve the term “theory” for ideas about the mechanisms of modification. This distinction is found in most biology textbooks that deal with evolution.

(b) Yet some of the best evidence for the “fact” of evolution comes from the fossil record, homology, and embryology--and as we have seen, there are serious problems with all three. The claim that evolution is a fact, like the claim that humans evolved from ape-like ancestors, owes more to materialistic philosophy than to empirical science.

(c) If anything demonstrates “a pattern of evolutionary biologists’ ‘misrepresenting the facts’,” it is the NCSE’s evasive and false answers to my Ten Questions.

My Response in Detail:

(a) Darwin called his theory “descent with modification.” He wrote in 1859: “I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings” which lived in the remote past, and he considered natural selection “the main but not exclusive means of modification.” Thus from the very beginning the theory of biological evolution has had two elements: the pattern of descent from a common ancestor, and the processes by which descendants have been modified. As the NCSE points out, ideas about the processes of evolution have been augmented by modern research, but the idea of an underlying pattern of descent from a universal common ancestor has remained unchanged since Darwin’s time. Defenders of Darwin’s theory often refer to universal common ancestry as a “fact,” reserving the term “theory” for ideas about process.²³

(b) This distinction is found in most biology textbooks that deal with evolution. For example, Futuyma’s Evolutionary Biology (3rd Edition, 1998) tells students: “Descent with modification from common ancestors is a scientific fact, that is, a hypothesis so well supported by evidence that we take it to be true. The theory of evolution, on the other hand, is a complex body of statements, well supported but still incomplete, about the causes of evolution.” Guttman’s Biology (1999) makes the same distinction: “The concept of evolution actually has two faces--one fact, one theory. If we ask how all the organisms on Earth have reached their present forms, the answer is that they have evolved. This answer is based on such an enormous, coherent body of evidence that we must take it as a fact. By contrast, the other face of evolution, the complex body of ideas about how evolution occurs, is a theory.” According to Audesirk, Audesirk and Byers’s Life On Earth (2nd Edition, 2000), evolution means that “modern organisms descended, with modification, from pre-existing life-forms.” The book then asserts: “Virtually all biologists consider evolution to be a fact. Although debates still rage over the mechanisms of evolutionary change, exceedingly few biologists dispute that evolution occurs. Why? Because an overwhelming body of evidence permits no other conclusion.” Yet the textbooks claim that some of the best evidence for the “fact” of evolution comes from the fossil record, homology, and embryology--and as we have seen, there are serious problems with all three. Why, then, are we still told that evolution is a fact? ²⁴

(c) It seems to me that this claim, like the claim that humans evolved from ape-like ancestors, owes more to materialistic philosophy than to empirical science. Audesirk, Audesirk and Byers’s Life On Earth (2nd Edition, 2000) tells students: “Over the course of human history, two approaches have been taken to the study of life and other natural phenomena. The first assumes that some events happen through the intervention of supernatural forces…. In contrast, science adheres to the principle of natural causality: All events can be traced to natural causes.” The claim that “all events can be traced to natural causes” is not a methodological statement limiting science to the study of natural phenomena, but a sweeping metaphysical statement about the whole of reality: It is an affirmation of materialism. Guttman’s Biology (1999), as we saw above, promotes materialism in its statements that evolution is purposeless and undirected. And Futuyma’s Evolutionary Biology (3rd Edition, 1998) tells upper division and graduate students: “By coupling undirected, purposeless variation to the blind, uncaring process of natural selection, Darwin made theological or spiritual explanations of the life processes superfluous.” Futuyma concludes that it was Darwin’s theory of evolution, together with Marx’s view of history and Freud’s view of human nature “that provided a crucial plank to the platform of mechanism and materialism” that “has since been the stage of most Western thought." ²⁵

(d) According to the NCSE, my Ten Questions fail to “demonstrate a pattern of evolutionary biologists’ ‘misrepresenting the facts’.” Yet the NCSE’s evasive and false answers to my questions clearly demonstrate such a pattern. The NCSE’s evasions include: using “major groups” to denote vertebrate classes rather than animal phyla, thus side-stepping the challenge to Darwin’s theory posed by the Cambrian explosion; listing embryos from only one vertebrate class to give the illusion that similarities among the embryos of ALL classes provide evidence for common ancestry; and comparing staged photos of peppered moths that misrepresent the truth to historical re-enactments of events that actually happened. Furthermore, the NCSE makes numerous false claims about the scientific evidence, such as the following: the Miller-Urey experiment succeeded in showing how organic molecules might have been produced on the early Earth (it didn’t); when the experiment is repeated using a more realistic mixture of gasses, it still produces most of the same building blocks (it doesn’t); fish do not appear in the Cambrian explosion (they do); the early stages of vertebrate embryos are generally more similar than later stages (they’re not); and anatomical mutations in fruit flies produce novel structures that provide raw materials for evolution (they don’t). The NCSE also makes statements about biology textbooks that are demonstrably false, for example: textbooks do not rely on faked embryo drawings; very few textbooks feature the four-winged fruit fly; and textbooks do not use drawings of ape-like humans in the context of promoting materialistic philosophy. Simple examination shows that many textbooks do these very things. To see a pattern of evolutionary biologists’ misrepresenting the facts, one needs only to read the NCSE’s answers to my “Ten Questions To Ask Your Biology Teacher About Evolution.”

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Conclusion:

The NCSE introduces its answers to my Ten Questions by calling many of my claims “incorrect or misleading,” and by maintaining that they are “intended only to create unwarranted doubts in students’ minds about the validity of evolution as good science.” The evasions and falsehoods listed above, however, make it clear that it is the NCSE’s answers that are incorrect or misleading. If students have doubts about the scientific validity of evolution, their doubts are amply warranted not only by the systematic pattern of misrepresentations in biology textbooks, but also by the false and evasive statements the NCSE makes in defense of those misrepresentations.

Good science is the search for truth, and it searches for truth by comparing theories with the evidence. A good science education should present the evidence truthfully--especially the evidence for and against a theory as influential as Darwin’s. Yet biology textbooks invariably present this evidence with a pro-Darwin spin, indoctrinating students rather than educating them. It seems that the National Center for Science Education, despite its title, wants students to inherit the spin.

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REFERENCES

Note: More detailed information on all ten questions is available in my book, Icons of Evolution (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2000; paperback edition 2002).

¹The relevant page numbers in the cited textbooks are: Campbell, Reece and Mitchell's Biology (5th Edition, 1999), p. 494; Mader's Biology (6th Edition, 1998), p. 325; Starr and Taggart's Biology: The Unity and Diversity of Life (8th Edition, 1998), p. 335; Schraer and Stoltze's Biology: The Study of Life (7th Edition, 1999), pp. 590-591; Guttman's Biology (1999), p. 603; Audesirk, Audesirk and Byers's Life On Earth (2nd Edition, 2000), p. 271; Purves, Sadava, Orians and Heller's Life: The Science of Biology (6th Edition, 2001), p. 451; Alberts, Bray, Lewis, Raff, Roberts and Watson's Molecular Biology of the Cell (3rd Edition, 1994), p. 4; Futuyma's Evolutionary Biology (3rd Edition, 1998), p. 167; Freeman and Herron's Evolutionary Analysis (2nd Edition, 2001), p. 481.

²For the consensus among geochemists that the Miller-Urey experiment did not realistically simulate the Earth's early atmosphere, see Heinrich D. Holland, "Model for the Evolution of the Earth's Atmosphere," pp. 447-477 in A. E. J. Engel, Harold L. James and B. F. Leonard (editors), Petrologic Studies: A Volume in Honor of A. F. Buddington (Geological Society of America, 1962), pp. 448-449; Philip H. Abelson, "Chemical Events on the Primitive Earth," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 55 (1966), 1365-1372; Marcel Florkin, "Ideas and Experiments in the Field of Prebiological Chemical Evolution," Comprehensive Biochemistry 29B (1975), 231-260, pp. 241-242; and Sidney W. Fox and Klaus Dose, Molecular Evolution and the Origin of Life, Revised Edition (New York: Marcel Dekker, 1977), pp. 43, 74-76. Concerning the failure of the Miller-Urey experiment when a realistic "atmosphere" is used, see Gordon Schlesinger and Stanley L. Miller, "Prebiotic Synthesis in Atmospheres Containing CH4, CO, and CO2: I. Amino Acids,"; Journal of Molecular Evolution 19 (1983), 376-382; and John Horgan, "In the Beginning..."; Scientific American (February 1991), 116-126, p. 121.

³Nicholas Wade, "Life's Origins Get Murkier and Messier," The New York Times (Tuesday, June 13, 2000), pp. D1-D2.

⁴Philippe Janvier, "Catching the first fish," Nature 402 (November 4, 1999), pp. 21-22; D-G. Shu, H-L. Luo, S. Conway Morris, X-L. Zhang, S-X. Hu, L. Chen, J. Han, M. Zhu, Y. Li and L-Z. Chen, "Lower Cambrian vertebrates from south China," Nature 402 (1999), 42-46; Jun-Yuan Chen, Di-Ying Huang and Chia-Wei Li, "An early Cambrian craniate-like chordate," Nature 402 (1999), 518-522; Fred Heeren, "A Little Fish Challenges a Big Giant," The Boston Globe (May 30, 2000), E1

⁵James W. Valentine, Stanley M. Awramik, Philip W. Signor and Peter M. Sadler, "The Biological Explosion at the Precambrian-Cambrian Boundary," Evolutionary Biology 25 (1991), 279-356; Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (1st Edition, 1859), Chap. IX.

⁶The relevant page numbers in the cited textbooks are: Starr and Taggart's Biology: The Unity and Diversity of Life (8th Edition, 1998), pp. 318-319; Johnson's Biology: Visualizing Life (1998), p. 178; Campbell, Reece and Mitchell's Biology (5th Edition, 1999), p. 424; Raven and Johnson's Biology (5th Edition, 1999), pp. 412, 416; Audesirk, Audesirk and Byers's Life On Earth (2nd Edition, 2000), p. 236.

⁷Michael Lynch, "The Age and Relationships of the Major Animal Phyla," Evolution 53 (1999), 319-325, p. 323.

⁸William W. Ballard, "Problems of gastrulation: real and verbal," BioScience 26 (1976), 36-39, p. 38; Richard P. Elinson, "Change in developmental patterns: embryos of amphibians with large eggs," pp. 1-21 in R. A. Raff and E. C. Raff (editors), Development as an Evolutionary Process, vol. 8 (New York: Alan R. Liss, 1987), p. 3; Rudolf A. Raff, The Shape of Life: Genes, Development, and the Evolution of Animal Form (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 208; and M. K. Richardson, J. Hanken, M. L. Gooneratne, C. Pieau, A. Raynaud, L. Selwood, and G. M. Wright, "There is no highly conserved embryonic stage in the vertebrates: implications for current theories of evolution and development," Anatomy and Embryology 196 (1997), 91-106.

⁹E. M. del Pino and R. P. Elinson, "A novel developmental pattern for frogs: Gastrulation produces an embryonic disk," Nature 306 (1983), 589-591; James Hanken et al., "Cranial Ontogeny in the Direct-Developing Frog, Eleutherodactylus coqui (Anura: Leptodactylidae), Analyzed Using Whole-Mount Immunohistochemistry," Journal of Morphology 211 (1992), 95-118

¹⁰The relevant page numbers in the cited textbooks are: Starr and Taggart's Biology: The Unity and Diversity of Life (8th Edition, 1998), p. 317; Guttman's Biology (1999), p. 718; Biggs, Kapicka and Lundgren's Biology: The Dynamics of Life (1998), p. 433; Schraer and Stoltze's Biology: The Study of Life (7th Edition, 1999), p. 583; Miller and Levine's Biology (5th Edition, 2000), p. 283; Futuyma's Evolutionary Biology (3rd Edition, 1998), p. 653; Alberts, Bray, Lewis, Raff, Roberts and Watson's Molecular Biology of the Cell (3rd Edition, 1994), pp. 32-33. The Gould quotation is from pp. 44-46 of his essay, "Abscheulich! Atrocious!" Natural History (March, 2000), pp. 42-49.

¹¹The relevant page numbers in the cited textbooks are: Starr and Taggart's Biology: The Unity and Diversity of Life (8th Edition, 1998), p. 278; Schraer and Stoltze's Biology: The Study of Life (7th Edition, 1999), p. 761; Mader's Biology (6th Edition, 1998), p. 296; Raven and Johnson's Biology (5th Edition, 1999), p. 413.

¹²Henry Gee, In Search of Deep Time (New York: The Free Press, 1999), p. 23.

¹³See Kevin Padian and Luis M. Chiappe, "The origin and early evolution of birds," Biological Reviews 73 (1998), 1-42. For a thorough and expert critique of the view advocated by Padian and other cladists, see Alan Feduccia, The Origin and Evolution of Birds (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 45-91.

¹⁴Theodore D. Sargent, Craig D. Millar and David M. Lambert, "The 'Classical' Explanation of Industrial Melanism: Assessing the Evidence," Evolutionary Biology 30 (1998), 299-322, pp. 318; Jerry A. Coyne, "Not black and white," a review of Michael Majerus's Melanism: Evolution in Action, Nature 396 (1998), 35-36. See also Jonathan Wells, "Second Thoughts about Peppered Moths," The Scientist (May 24, 1999), 13

¹⁵The relevant page numbers in the cited textbooks are: Johnson's Biology: Visualizing Life (1998), p. 182; Guttman's Biology (1999), pp. 35-36; Schraer and Stoltze's Biology: The Study of Life (7th Edition, 1999), pp. 618-619; Miller and Levine's Biology (5th Edition, 2000), pp. 297-298; Mader's Biology (6th Edition, 1998), pp. 11-12, 306.

¹⁶For details of the Grants' research, see Peter R. Grant, Ecology and Evolution of Darwin's Finches (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), and Jonathan Weiner, The Beak of the Finch (New York: Vintage Books, 1994). The Miller-Levine quotation is from Biology: The Living Science (Prentice-Hall, 1998), pp. 254-255. The NAS quotation is from Science and Creationism: A View from the National Academy of Sciences (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1999), "Evidence Supporting Biological Evolution," p, 2, http://books.nap.edu/html/creationism/evidence.html.

¹⁷Alan H. Linton, The Times Higher Education Supplement (April 20, 2001), p. 29; Phillip E. Johnson, "The Church of Darwin," The Wall Street Journal (August 16, 1999), p. A14.

¹⁸The relevant page numbers in the cited textbooks are: Mader's Biology (6th Edition, 1998), pp. 304, 921; Raven and Johnson's Biology (5th Edition, 1999), pp. 394, 1154; Guttman's Biology (1999), pp. 34, 437; Purves, Sadava, Orians and Heller's Life: The Science of Biology (6th Edition, 2001), pp. 439-445; Futuyma's Evolutionary Biology (3rd Edition, 1998), pp. 48-49; Freeman and Herron's Evolutionary Analysis (2nd Edition, 2001), pp. 588-590.

¹⁹E. B. Lewis, "A gene complex controlling segmentation in Drosophila," Nature 276 (1978), 565-570; Mark Peifer & Welcome Bender, "The anterobithorax and bithorax mutations of the bithorax complex," EMBO Journal 5 (1986), 2293-2303.

²⁰On the absence of flight muscles in the second pair of wings, see J. Fernandes, S. E. Celniker, E. B. Lewis & K. VijayRaghavan, "Muscle development in the four-winged Drosophila and the role of the Ultrabithorax gene," Current Biology 4 (1994), 957-964; Sudipto Roy, L. S. Shashidhara & K. VijayRaghavan, "Muscles in the Drosophila second thoracic segment are patterned independently of autonomous homeotic gene function," Current Biology 7 (1997), 222-227. The Mayr quotation is from Ernst Mayr, Populations, Species and Evolution, an abridgment of his 1963 book, Animal Species and Evolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), pp. 251-253.

²¹F. Clark Howell, "Thoughts on the Study and Interpretation of the Human Fossil Record," pp. 1-39 in W. Eric Meikle, F. Clark Howell & Nina G. Jablonski (editors), Contemporary Issues in Human Evolution, Memoir 21 (San Francisco: California Academy of Sciences, 1996), pp. 3, 31; Geoffrey A. Clark, "Through a Glass Darkly: Conceptual Issues in Modern Human Origins Research," pp. 60-76 in G. A. Clark & C. M. Willermet (editors), Conceptual Issues in Modern Human Origins Research (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1997), pp. 60-62; Henry Gee, In Search of Deep Time: Beyond the Fossil Record to a New History of Life (New York: The Free Press, 1999), pp. 32, 202.

²²The relevant page numbers in the cited textbooks are: Guttman's Biology (1999), pp. 36-37, 774-777; Miller and Levine's Biology (5th Edition, 2000), pp. 658, 762-764; Purves, Sadava, Orians and Heller's Life: The Science of Biology (6th Edition, 2001), pp. 3, 597-598; Raven and Johnson's Biology (5th Edition, 1999), pp. 15, 448-450; Campbell, Reece and Mitchell's Biology (5th Edition, 1999), pp. 412-413, 660. The Dawkins quote is from Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the evidence of evolution reveals a universe without design (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986), p. 6.

²³The Darwin quotations are from Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (1st Edition, 1859), Introduction and Conclusion.

²⁴The relevant page numbers in the cited textbooks are: Futuyma's Evolutionary Biology (3rd Edition, 1998), p. 15; Guttman's Biology (1999), p. 8; Audesirk, Audesirk and Byers's Life On Earth (2nd Edition, 2000), pp. 8-9, 12, 235.

²⁵The relevant page numbers in the cited textbooks are: Audesirk, Audesirk and Byers's Life On Earth (2nd Edition, 2000), pp. 8-9, 12, 235; Guttman's Biology (1999), pp. 36-37; Futuyma';s Evolutionary Biology (3rd Edition, 1998), p. 5.

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The New York Times seems to be afraid that students about to go back to school might have their heads filled with ideas that challenge Darwinian evolution. Thus today it uncritically republished a 6+ year-old error-filled response by the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) to Jonathan Wells' Ten Questions to Ask your Biology Teacher About Evolution. Bruce Chapman already responded to the Times articles on DiscoveryBlog, here.

Of course, the NCSE's attempted response didn't really answer the "Ten Questions" then, and it doesn't now. In fact, in 2002 Jonathan Wells authored a forceful rebuttal to the NCSE, "Inherit The Spin: Darwinists Answer 'Ten Questions' with Evasions and Falsehoods," which we have now reprinted below so that readers may judge for themselves whether the NCSE has actually answered the "Ten Questions":

Inherit The Spin: The National Center For Science Education Answers “Ten Questions To Ask Your Biology Teacher About Evolution” with Evasions and Falsehoods
by Jonathan Wells, January 15, 2002.

Original Source.

A year ago, I posted “Ten Questions To Ask Your Biology Teacher About Evolution” at http://www.iconsofevolution.com/tools/questions.php3.

On November 28, 2001, The National Center for Science Education (NCSE) posted its answers to my questions at http://www.ncseweb.org/resources/articles/7719_responses_to_jonathan_wells3_11_28_2001.asp.

According to the NCSE, many of the claims in my questions “are incorrect or misleading,” and they are “intended only to create unwarranted doubts in students’ minds about the validity of evolution as good science.” It is actually the NCSE’s answers, however, that are incorrect or misleading. My original questions (in italics) are posted below; each question is followed by the NCSE’s answer (in bold), a brief outline of my response, and then my detailed response. Numbers in parentheses refer to research notes at the end.

Please feel free to copy and distribute this document to teachers, students, parents, and other interested parties.

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My Question: ORIGIN OF LIFE. Why do textbooks claim that the 1953 Miller-Urey experiment shows how life’s building blocks may have formed on the early Earth--when conditions on the early Earth were probably nothing like those used in the experiment, and the origin of life remains a mystery?

NCSE’s Answer: Because evolutionary theory works with any model of the origin of life on Earth, how life originated is not a question about evolution. Textbooks discuss the 1953 studies because they were the first successful attempt to show how organic molecules might have been produced on the early Earth. When modern scientists changed the experimental conditions to reflect better knowledge of the Earth’s early atmosphere, they were able to produce most of the same building blocks. Origin-of-life remains a vigorous area of research.

My Response in Outline:

(a) Most biology textbooks include the origin of life--and the Miller-Urey experiment--in their treatments of evolution. If the NCSE feels that the origin of life is really “not a question about evolution,” the organization should launch a campaign to correct biology textbooks.

(b) Because the Miller-Urey experiment used a simulated atmosphere that geochemists now agree was incorrect, it was not the “first successful attempt to show how organic molecules might have been produced on the early Earth.” When conditions are changed to reflect better knowledge of the Earth’s early atmosphere, the experiment doesn’t work.

(c) If the origin of life “remains a vigorous area of research,” it is only because origin-of-life researchers are dedicated to their work, not because they have discovered anything that demonstrates how life originated.

My Response in Detail:

(a) The NCSE’s claim that the origin of life is “not a question about evolution” ignores the fact that most biology textbooks include it--along with the Miller-Urey experiment--in their treatments of evolution. For example, Campbell, Reece and Mitchell’s Biology (5th Edition, 1999), one of the most widely used introductory textbooks for college undergraduates, discusses the Miller-Urey experiment in “Unit Five: The Evolutionary History of Biological Diversity.” Similarly, Mader’s Biology (6th Edition, 1998), Starr and Taggart’s Biology: The Unity and Diversity of Life (8th Edition, 1998), Schraer and Stoltze’s Biology: The Study of Life (7th Edition, 1999), Guttman’s Biology (1999), Audesirk, Audesirk and Byers’s Life On Earth (2nd Edition, 2000), and Purves, Sadava, Orians and Heller’s Life: The Science of Biology (6th Edition, 2001) all feature the Miller-Urey experiment in their sections dealing with evolution. Alberts, Bray, Lewis, Raff, Roberts and Watson’s upper-division textbook for biology majors, Molecular Biology of the Cell (3rd Edition, 1994), discusses it in a chapter titled “Evolution of the Cell.” The Miller-Urey experiment is also standard fare in upper division and graduate-level textbooks devoted entirely to evolution, such as Futuyma’s Evolutionary Biology (3rd Edition, 1998) and Freeman and Herron’s Evolutionary Analysis (2nd Edition, 2001). If the NCSE feels that the origin of life is really “not a question about evolution,” the organization should launch a campaign to correct biology textbooks.(1)

(b) The 1953 Miller-Urey experiment used a simulated hydrogen-rich atmosphere of methane, ammonia, hydrogen and water vapor. By 1970, however, geochemists were nearly unanimous in agreeing that the Earth’s primitive atmosphere was nothing like this. Excess hydrogen is quickly lost to space because the Earth’s gravity is too weak to hold it, so the early atmosphere would almost certainly have consisted of gasses emitted from volcanoes--mainly carbon dioxide, nitrogen and water vapor. When this more realistic mixture is put into a Miller-Urey-type apparatus, the experiment doesn’t work. Stanley Miller himself reported in 1983 that the most he could produce in the absence of methane was glycine, the simplest amino acid, and then only if free hydrogen were present. But free hydrogen is precisely what geochemists now agree was essentially ABSENT. So the Miller-Urey experiment was unsuccessful, and NCSE’s claim that it was the “first successful attempt to show how organic molecules might have been produced on the early Earth” is false. The NCSE’s claim that “when modern scientists changed the experimental conditions to reflect better knowledge of the Earth’s early atmosphere, they were able to produce most of the same building blocks” is also false. (2)

(c) If the origin of life “remains a vigorous area of research,” it is only because origin-of-life researchers are dedicated to their work, not because they have discovered anything that demonstrates how life originated. As New York Times science reporter Nicholas Wade wrote in 2000: “Everything about the origin of life on Earth is a mystery, and it seems the more that is known, the more acute the puzzles get.” (3)

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My Question: DARWIN’S TREE OF LIFE. Why don’t textbooks discuss the “Cambrian explosion,” in which all major animal groups appear together in the fossil record fully formed instead of branching from a common ancestor--thus contradicting the evolutionary tree of life?

NCSE’s Answer: Wells is wrong: fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals all are post-Cambrian--aren’t these “major groups”? We would recognize very few of the Cambrian organisms as “modern”; they are in fact at the roots of the tree of life, showing the earliest appearances of some key features of groups of animals--but not all features and not all groups. Researchers are linking these Cambrian groups using not only fossils but also data from developmental biology.

My Response in Outline:

(a) The NCSE is wrong: Fish DID make their first appearance in the Cambrian explosion.

(b) The “major groups” to which my question refers are the animal phyla. Fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals are sub-groups (classes) of a single phylum. The NCSE is using semantics to give the illusion that the Cambrian explosion never happened.

(c) It is through assumption and extrapolation, not “fossils” and “data from developmental biology,” that Darwinists are supposedly “linking” the Cambrian groups.

My Response in Detail:

(a) The fossil record shows that fish were among the animals that made their first appearance in the Cambrian explosion. (4)

(b) Fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals are not the “major groups” to which my question refers. As every biologist knows, animals are classified into a hierarchy of groups: species, genera, families, orders, classes, and phyla. The phyla are the several dozen major categories that distinguish mollusks, arthropods, echinoderms, annelids and chordates, among others. (Modern representatives of the five phyla listed include snails, insects, starfish, earthworms and mammals, respectively.) Fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals are sub-groups (classes) of the chordate phylum. Since fish first appeared in the early Cambrian, this phylum was present in the Cambrian explosion, even though not all of its sub-groups were. Representatives of the five phyla listed here, and most of the other phyla as well--the “major groups” of animals recognized by all biologists--appear in the Cambrian explosion, with no fossil evidence that they evolved from a common ancestor. Berkeley paleontologist James Valentine and his colleagues wrote in 1991 that the Cambrian explosion “was even more abrupt and extensive than previously envisioned” and gives the impression that animal evolution “has by and large proceeded from the ‘top down’.” This does not fit Darwin’s theory that major differences should have evolved over millions of years from minor differences in a single ancestral species--that is, from the “bottom up.” By labeling vertebrate classes “major groups,” the NCSE uses a semantic trick to give the illusion that the Cambrian explosion never happened, and that the conflict with Darwin’s theory doesn’t exist. Similarly, most biology textbooks avoid any mention of the Cambrian explosion, and the few that do mention it try to dismiss it. The NCSE, like the textbooks, is concealing a problem with the fossil record so significant that Darwin himself considered it a “valid argument” against his theory. (5)

(c) The NCSE’s claim that “researchers are linking these Cambrian groups using not only fossils but also data from developmental biology” is profoundly misleading. First, the principal lesson of the Cambrian explosion is that the fossils needed for “linking” the phyla to a common ancestor are nonexistent. Second, with a few rare exceptions developmental data are available only from living animals. Although embryological similarities and differences can help us to classify living animals into phyla, we can only speculate how most extinct animals developed. Darwinian researchers ASSUME the existence of a common ancestor, and then extrapolate modern similarities and differences hundreds of millions of years into the past to guess what the hypothetical ancestor might have been or how it might have developed. Thus it is through assumption and extrapolation, not “fossils” and “data from developmental biology,” that Darwinists are “linking” the Cambrian groups.

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My Question: HOMOLOGY. Why do textbooks define homology as similarity due to common ancestry, then claim that it is evidence for common ancestry--a circular argument masquerading as scientific evidence?

NCSE’s Answer: The same anatomical structure (such as a leg or an antenna) in two species may be similar because it was inherited from a common ancestor (homology) or because of similar adaptive pressure (convergence). Homology of structures across species is not assumed, but tested by the repeated comparison of numerous features that do or do not sort into successive clusters. Homology is used to test hypotheses of degrees of relatedness. Homology is not “evidence” for common ancestry: common ancestry is inferred based on many sources of information, and reinforced by the patterns of similarity and dissimilarity of anatomical structures.

My Response in Outline:

(a) I thank the NCSE for conceding my main point: Homology (defined by modern Darwinists as similarity due to common ancestry) is not evidence of common ancestry.

(b) Yet many biology textbooks tell students that it is. When the NCSE launches its campaign to correct textbooks that treat the origin of life as part of evolution, it should also correct textbooks that treat homology as evidence for common ancestry.

(c) At the level of the animal phyla, common ancestry is not inferred from “sources of information” such as fossils, molecules or embryos; instead, it is assumed on theoretical grounds.

My Response in Detail:

(a) As the NCSE acknowledges, homology (defined by modern Darwinists as similarity due to common ancestry) is not evidence of common ancestry.

(b) Why, then, do many biology textbooks tell students that homology is evidence of common ancestry? For example, Starr and Taggart’s Biology: The Unity and Diversity of Life (8th Edition, 1998), states that the “pattern of macroevolution — that is, change from the form of a common ancestor — is called morphological divergence…. Homology [is] a similarity in one or more body parts in different organisms that share a common ancestor…. Homologous structures provide very strong evidence of morphological divergence.” In a section on “The Evidence for Evolution” in the teacher’s edition of Johnson’s Biology: Visualizing Life (1998), students are told that “homologous structures are structures that share a common ancestor,” and an accompanying note tells the teacher that “such structures point to a common ancestry.” According to Campbell, Reece and Mitchell’s Biology (5th Edition, 1999), “similarity in characteristics resulting from common ancestry is known as homology, and such anatomical signs of evolution are called homologous structures. Comparative anatomy is consistent with all other evidence in testifying [to] evolution.” Raven and Johnson’s Biology (5th Edition, 1999), in a section titled “The evidence for macroevolution is extensive,” includes the following: “Homology: Many organisms exhibit organs that are similar in structure to those in a recent common ancestor. This is evidence of evolutionary relatedness.” A few pages later, the same textbook explicitly defines homologous structures as “structures with different appearances and functions that all derived from the same body part in a common ancestor.” Audesirk, Audesirk and Byers’s Life On Earth (2nd Edition, 2000) calls homology “evidence of relatedness” in a section titled “Comparative Anatomy Provides Structural Evidence of Evolution.” The textbook tells students: “Internally similar structures are called homologous structures, meaning that they have the same evolutionary origin despite possible differences in function. Studies of comparative anatomy have long been used to determine the relationships among organisms, on the grounds that the more similar the internal structures of two species, the more closely related the species must be, that is, the more recently they must have diverged from a common ancestor.” When the NCSE launches its campaign to correct textbooks that treat the origin of life as part of evolution, it should also correct textbooks that treat homology as evidence for common ancestry. (6)

(c) According to the NCSE, “common ancestry is inferred based on many sources of evidence.” As we have seen, however, at the level of the animal phyla the fossil record does not support such an inference. Neither does the molecular evidence. As biologist Michael Lynch wrote in 1999: “Clarification of the phylogenetic [i.e., evolutionary] relationships of the major animal phyla has been an elusive problem, with analyses based on different genes and even different analyses based on the same genes yielding a diversity of phylogenetic trees.” And as the next question demonstrates, the embryological evidence does not support common ancestry even at the level of the vertebrate classes, much less at the phylum level. At these levels, common ancestry is assumed on theoretical grounds, not inferred from evidence. (7)

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My Question: VERTEBRATE EMBRYOS. Why do textbooks use drawings of similarities in vertebrate embryos as evidence for their common ancestry--even though biologists have known for over a century that vertebrate embryos are not most similar in their early stages, and the drawings are faked?

NCSE’s Answer: Twentieth-century and current embryological research confirms that early stages (if not the earliest) of vertebrate embryos are more similar than later ones; the more recently species shared a common ancestor, the more similar their embryological development. Thus cows and rabbits--mammals--are more similar in their embryological development than either is to alligators. Cows and antelopes are more similar in their embryology than either is to rabbits, and so on. The union of evolution and developmental biology--”evo-devo”--is one of the most rapidly growing biological fields. “Faked” drawings are not relied upon: there has been plenty of research in developmental biology since Haeckel--and in fact, hardly any textbooks feature Haeckel’s drawings, as claimed.

My Response in Outline:

(a) Far from confirming the NCSE’s claim that the early stages of vertebrate embryos are more similar than later ones, embryological research confirms that the claim is false.

(b) The NCSE’s claim that “the more recently species shared a common ancestor, the more similar their embryological development” is also false.

(c) Textbooks claim that the various CLASSES of vertebrates resemble each other in their early stages. By focusing on taxonomic levels below classes, the NCSE is attempting to evade the issue.

(d) Although the NCSE claims that “faked” drawings “are not relied upon,” a simple examination of biology textbooks shows that the NCSE is wrong.

My Response in Detail:

(a) Contrary to the NCSE’s claim, the early stages of vertebrate embryos are generally NOT more similar than later ones. Early vertebrate embryos actually look very different from each other, then they converge somewhat in appearance midway through development before diverging again--a pattern known to embryologists as the “developmental hourglass.” Birds and mammals, for example, have fundamentally different patterns of early cell divisions (called “cleavage”), yet the two classes look somewhat similar for a short time midway through development. In the 1860’s, German Darwinist Ernst Haeckel produced drawings of vertebrate embryos that not only exaggerated their similarities at the midpoint of development, but also omitted the strikingly different stages that preceded the midpoint. The drawings gave the impression that vertebrate embryos are most similar in their early stages, suggesting common ancestry; but the drawings were faked, and the impression is false. In 1976, embryologist William Ballard wrote that it is “only by semantic tricks and subjective selection of evidence,” by “bending the facts of nature,” that one can argue that the cleavage and gastrulation stages of vertebrates “are more alike than their adults.” (Gastrulation refers to the cell movements that follow the cleavage stage.) In 1987, developmental biologist Richard Elinson noted that the early embryos of frogs, chicks and mice “are radically different in such fundamental properties as egg size, fertilization mechanisms, cleavage patterns, and [gastrulation] movements.” Thus “twentieth-century and current embryological research” confirms that the NCSE is wrong. (8)

(b) The NCSE further claims that “the more recently species shared a common ancestor, the more similar their embryological development.” As a general description of vertebrate embryos, however, this is also false. For example, the pattern of development in some frog species looks very much like that in birds, but no one thinks those frogs are more closely related to birds than to other frogs. (9)

(c) The standard textbook claim is that the various CLASSES of vertebrates resemble each other in their early stages. Yet in its answer, the NCSE compares representatives of only one class, mammals. No one doubts that the embryos of mammals tend to resemble each other more than they resemble the embryos of reptiles, but Haeckel’s drawings fraudulently portrayed the embryos of ALL vertebrate classes as though they were alike. Just as the NCSE evaded my question about the “tree of life” by focusing on classes instead of phyla, here the NCSE evades my question about vertebrate embryos by focusing on taxonomic levels below classes. The NCSE thereby resorts to exactly the sort of “semantic tricks and subjective selection of evidence” criticized by Ballard in 1976.

(d) According to the NCSE, “faked” drawings “are not relied upon,” and “hardly any textbooks feature Haeckel’s drawings.” Yet two college textbooks, Starr and Taggart’s Biology: The Unity and Diversity of Life (8th Edition, 1998) and Guttman’s Biology (1999) feature slightly redrawn versions of Haeckel’s faked originals. Three high-school textbooks, Biggs, Kapicka and Lundgren’s Biology: The Dynamics of Life (1998), Schraer and Stoltze’s Biology: The Study of Life (7th Edition, 1999), and Miller and Levine’s Biology (5th Edition, 2000), contain stylized drawings that improve only slightly on Haeckel, and perpetuate Haeckel’s misrepresentation of the midpoint of development as the first stage. Worse yet, two advanced textbooks for college biology majors feature Haeckel’s original drawings: Alberts, Bray, Lewis, Raff, Roberts and Watson’s Molecular Biology of the Cell (3rd Edition, 1994), and Futuyma’s Evolutionary Biology (3rd Edition, 1998). It was textbooks like these that prompted Harvard evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould to write in 2000: “We do, I think, have the right to be both astonished and ashamed by the century of mindless recycling that has led to the persistence of these drawings in a large number, if not a majority, of modern textbooks.” (10)

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My Question: ARCHAEOPTERYX. Why do textbooks portray this fossil as the missing link between dinosaurs and modern birds--even though modern birds are probably not descended from it, and its supposed ancestors do not appear until millions of years after it?

NCSE’s Answer: The notion of a “missing link” is an out-of-date misconception about how evolution works. Archaeopteryx (and other feathered fossils) shows how a branch of reptiles gradually acquired both the unique anatomy and flying adaptations found in all modern birds. It is a transitional fossil in that it shows both reptile ancestry and bird specializations. Wells’s claim that “supposed ancestors” are younger than Archaeopteryx is false. These fossils are not ancestors but relatives of Archaeopteryx and, as everyone knows, your uncle can be younger than you!

My Response in Outline:

(a) If the notion of a “missing link” is out of date, why do biology textbooks continue to use it? When the NCSE launches its long-overdue campaign against misconceptions in biology textbooks (such as calling the origin of life part of evolution, or using homology as evidence for common ancestry), it can add “missing link” to its list.

(b) If Darwin’s theory is true, there must have been organisms in the past that were transitional links between ancestors and descendants--yet most of them are missing from the fossil record. So the notion of “missing link” is no more “out-of-date” than evolutionary theory itself.

(c) Archaeopteryx is not preceded by fossils showing how reptiles “gradually acquired” bird-like features. Furthermore, without fossils of the appropriate age, the NCSE has no grounds for saying “Wells’s claim that ‘supposed ancestors’ are younger than Archaeopteryx is false.”

(d) Bird-like dinosaurs are not just younger than their supposed relative, but millions of generations younger, so it makes no sense to call them “uncles” of Archaeopteryx

My Response in Detail:

(a) Many biology textbooks call Archaeopteryx a “link” that once was missing but now is found. Starr and Taggart’s Biology: The Unity and Diversity of Life (8th Edition, 1998) calls Archaeopteryx “the first of the ‘missing links’.” Mader’s Biology (6th Edition, 1998), describes this fossil as “a transitional link between reptiles and modern birds.” Schraer and Stoltze’s Biology: The Study of Life (7th Edition, 1999) calls it “an evolutionary link between reptiles and birds.” And according to Raven and Johnson’s Biology (5th Edition, 1999), Archaeopteryx is an example of a fossil “linking” major groups. If the NCSE ever launches a campaign against misconceptions in biology textbooks (such as calling the origin of life part of evolution, or using homology as evidence for common ancestry), it can add “missing link” to its list. (11)

(b) In any case, the NCSE’s claim that “missing link” is a misconception is odd, since if Darwin’s theory is true there MUST have been organisms in the past that were transitional links between ancestors and descendants. Transitional links are a logical consequence of evolutionary theory, yet most of them are missing from the fossil record. Archaeopteryx is famous precisely because it is one of the few supposed links that have been found. So the notion of “missing link” cannot possibly be any more “out-of-date” than evolutionary theory itself. Of course, whether any PARTICULAR fossil can be determined to be a transitional link is open to serious doubt. According to Henry Gee, chief science writer for Nature, “the intervals of time that separate fossils are so huge that we cannot say anything definite about their possible connection through ancestry and descent.” But if the NCSE is suggesting, like Gee, that NO fossil can be identified as transitional between its ancestors and descendants, why does it call Archaeopteryx a “transitional fossil” that shows “reptilian ancestry” as well as bird-like features? (12)

(c) Archaeopteryx is the oldest bird in the fossil record. It appears fully formed, and it is not preceded by fossils showing gradual transitions from reptiles to birds. So the NCSE’s claim that it shows “how a branch of reptiles gradually acquired” bird-like features is false. If the NCSE is suggesting that this gradual transition is seen in bird-like dinosaurs (a view passionately--and controversially--defended by NCSE’s president, Kevin Padian), the problem is that these supposed ancestors do not appear in the fossil record until tens of millions of years AFTER Archaeopteryx. Without fossils of the appropriate age, the NCSE has no grounds for saying “Wells’s claim that ‘supposed ancestors’ are younger than Archaeopteryx is false.” (13)

(d) Calling bird-like dinosaurs “uncles” instead of “ancestors” of Archaeopteryx merely obscures the problem: Although an uncle isn’t the ancestor of his nephew, and the former can be younger than the latter, the two--by definition--are no more than a generation apart, and they are members of the same species. Yet according to the fossil record, Archaeopteryx is millions of generations older than the bird-like dinosaurs. Furthermore, the two are not in the same species--in fact, they’re not even in the same genus, family, order or class! It makes no sense to call David Ben-Gurion the “uncle” of Abraham--much less to call bird-like dinosaurs the “uncles” of Archaeopteryx

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My Question: PEPPERED MOTHS. Why do textbooks use pictures of peppered moths camouflaged on tree trunks as evidence for natural selection--when biologists have known since the 1980s that the moths don’t normally rest on tree trunks, and all the pictures have been staged?

NCSE’s Answer: These pictures are illustrations used to demonstrate a point--the advantage of protective coloration to reduce the danger of predation. The pictures are not the scientific evidence used to prove the point in the first place. Compare this illustration to the well-known re-enactments of the Battle of Gettysburg. Does the fact that these re-enactments are staged prove that the battle never happened? The peppered moth photos are the same sort of illustration, not scientific evidence for natural selection.

My Response in Outline:

(a) The NCSE’s first point is technically correct: The textbook pictures are illustrations, not actual evidence.

(b) The NCSE is using this technical point, however, to obscure the real issue: The textbook pictures misrepresent the natural resting-place of peppered moths and conceal serious flaws in the standard story.

(c) Staged peppered moth photos are not comparable to re-enactments of the Battle of Gettysburg, because the former misrepresent the truth.

(d) If using staged photos and re-telling a flawed story “demonstrate a point,” as the NCSE claims, the point is that students cannot trust what they read in their biology textbooks.

My Response in Detail:

(a) True, the textbook pictures are illustrations, not actual evidence. It would have been more accurate for me to write “examples of” or “illustrations of” instead of “evidence for.”

(b) The NCSE uses this technical point, however, to obscure the fact that textbook pictures misrepresent the evidence and conceal serious flaws in the peppered moth story. Two hundred years ago, almost all peppered moths in the U.K. were light-colored. During the industrial revolution, dark-colored moths became much more common--especially in the polluted woodlands around major cities. According to theory, the shift occurred because dark-colored moths were better camouflaged against pollution-darkened tree trunks, and thus less likely to be eaten by predatory birds. In the 1950’s, Bernard Kettlewell released light and dark-colored moths onto nearby tree trunks in polluted and unpolluted woodlands, and watched as birds ate the more visible ones. The story, and Kettlewell’s experiments, became the classic textbook example of natural selection. When pollution-control legislation resulted in cleaner air after the 1950s, light-colored moths became more common again, as the theory predicted. Contrary to the theory, however, this occurred BEFORE tree trunks reverted to their former light color. In the 1980s, biologists discovered that peppered moths don’t normally rest on tree trunks, and many began to question the classic story about camouflage and bird predation. In 1998, Theodore Sargent, Craig Millar and David Lambert wrote in Evolutionary Biology: “There is little persuasive evidence… to support this explanation at the present time.” And as University of Chicago evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne wrote in Nature, the fact that peppered moths do not normally rest on tree trunks “alone invalidates Kettlewell’s… experiments, as moths were released by placing them directly onto tree trunks.” (14)

(c) The NCSE’s comparison of staged peppered moth photos with re-enactments of the Battle of Gettysburg is inappropriate, because the former misrepresent the facts. The appropriate comparison would be with FALSE re-enactments of the Battle of Gettysburg--such as re-enactments staged in Chancellorsville (where the other side won). Scientific illustrations, like historical re-enactments, should portray the truth.

(d) Instead of telling students the truth about peppered moths, most biology textbooks repeat the classic story and illustrate it with staged pictures--many of them made by pinning or gluing dead moths to tree trunks. For example, Johnson’s Biology: Visualizing Life (1998), Guttman’s Biology (1999), Schraer and Stoltze’s Biology: The Study of Life (7th Edition, 1999), and Miller and Levine’s Biology(5th Edition, 2000) all use staged photos and summaries of Kettlewell’s experiments to convince students that peppered moths are a classic demonstration of natural selection in action. Mader’s Biology (6th Edition, 1998) goes even further, using Kettlewell’s experiments as the paramount example of how to do science: “The scientific method consists of forming a hypothesis, testing it, and coming to an conclusion…. In order to examine the scientific method in more detail, we will consider research performed by British scientist H.B.D. Kettlewell.” If these illustrations “demonstrate a point,” as the NCSE claims, the point is that students cannot trust what they read in their biology textbooks. (15)

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My Question: DARWIN’S FINCHES. Why do textbooks claim that beak changes in Galápagos finches during a severe drought can explain the origin of species by natural selection--even though the changes were reversed after the drought ended, and no net evolution occurred?

NCSE’s Answer: Textbooks present the finch data to illustrate natural selection: that populations change their physical features in response to changes in the environment. The finch studies carefully--exquisitely--documented how the physical features of an organism can affect its success in reproduction and survival, and that such changes can take place more quickly than was realized. That new species did not arise within the duration of the study hardly challenges evolution!

My Response in Outline:

(a) The NCSE is evading the question, which is not whether the finch data demonstrate natural selection (they do), but whether those data explain the origin of new species (they don’t).

(b) To the extent that scientific theories are supposed to rely on evidence, the finch study DOES challenge Darwin’s theory of the origin of species by natural selection. No one doubts that natural selection occurs, but every time it has been observed (as in the finches) it has occurred only within existing species.

My Response in Detail:

(a) The question is not whether the finch data demonstrate natural selection, but whether those data explain the origin of new species. In the 1970s, biologists Peter and Rosemary Grant watched as a severe drought killed 85% of a particular finch species on one island in the Galápagos archipelago. The survivors had (on average) slightly larger beaks, enabling them to crack the hard seeds that had weathered the drought; but average beak size returned to normal after the rains returned. There was no net change, and no new species emerged. In fact, several species of Galápagos finches now appear to be merging through hybridization--the exact opposite of producing new species. Yet some textbooks--and a publication of the U. S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS)--make it sound as though the finch studies showed how new species can originate. Miller and Levine’s Biology: The Living Science (1998) tells students: “It might take only between 12 and 20 droughts to change one species of finch into another!” According to Science and Creationism: A View from the National Academy of Sciences (1999), the Grants’ observations showed that “if droughts occur about once every ten years on the islands, a new species of finch might arise in only about 200 years,” making the Galápagos finches “a particularly compelling example of speciation [a technical term for the origin of new species].” Both the Miller-Levine textbook and the NAS booklet neglect to mention that the data actually point to oscillating selection with no net change, and now to the merging of species through hybridization. The question is not whether the Grants observed natural selection--they did--but why the evidence is exaggerated to make it appear to show much more. The NCSE fails to answer this question. (16)

(b) The fact that no new species arose in the course of the Grants’ study does not refute the theory of evolution. It certainly “challenges” it, however, because scientific theories need to be supported by evidence. Darwin’s theory, as expressed in the title of his 1859 book, was The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, and the Galápagos finches are held up by our nation’s premier science organization as a “particularly compelling example” of this. Yet the finch data do not show cumulative changes in beak size, much less the origin of species through natural selection. No one doubts that natural selection occurs, but every time it has been observed (as in the finches) it has occurred within existing species. For example, natural selection has often been observed in bacteria. Because of their rapid generation times, bacteria ought to be the easiest organisms in which to observe the origin of species through natural selection. Yet as British bacteriologist Alan H. Linton wrote in 2001: “Throughout 150 years of the science of bacteriology, there is no evidence that one species of bacteria has changed into another.” Faced with this lack of evidence for a key element of Darwin’s theory, some defenders of the theory--even in the prestigious NAS--have taken to exaggerating the finch data. Although this does not refute the theory, it hardly inspires confidence in it. As Berkeley law professor and Darwin critic Phillip E. Johnson wrote in 1999: “When our leading scientists have to resort to the sort of distortion that would land a stock promoter in jail, you know they are in trouble.” (17)

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My Question: MUTANT FRUIT FLIES. Why do textbooks use fruit flies with an extra pair of wings as evidence that DNA mutations can supply raw materials for evolution--even though the extra wings have no muscles and these disabled mutants cannot survive outside the laboratory?

NCSE’s Answer: In the very few textbooks that discuss four-winged fruit flies, they are used as an illustration of how genes can reprogram parts of the body to produce novel structures, thus indeed providing “raw material” for evolution. This type of mutation produces new structures that become available for further experimentation and potential new uses. Even if not every mutation leads to a new evolutionary pathway, the flies are a vivid example of one way mutation can provide variation for natural selection to work on.

My Response in Outline:

(a) The four-winged fruit fly is found in a lot more than “very few” textbooks.

(b) The mutations that produce the four-winged fruit fly lead to the LOSS of important structures--and to their replacement by duplicates of structures already present elsewhere in the fly--not to “new structures that become available for further experimentation.”

(c) Mutations must be advantageous to the organism in order to provide raw materials for evolution--otherwise, natural selection will tend to eliminate them. Yet the four-winged fruit fly is seriously disabled, so it is not “a vivid example of one way mutation can provide variation for natural selection to work on.”

My Response in Detail:

(a) More than a few textbooks use the four-winged fruit fly. Mader’s Biology (6th Edition, 1998), Raven and Johnson’s Biology (5th Edition, 1999), Guttman’s Biology (1999) and Purves, Sadava, Orians and Heller’s Life: The Science of Biology (6th Edition, 2001) all use pictures of four-winged fruit flies to illustrate how mutations can affect development--after telling students that gene mutations are the raw materials of evolution. Two advanced textbooks for biology majors, Futuyma’s Evolutionary Biology (3rd Edition, 1998) and Freeman and Herron’s Evolutionary Analysis (2nd Edition, 2001), include pictures of four-winged fruit flies in their discussions of how mutations supposedly provide raw materials for evolution. (18)

(b) Contrary to the NCSE’s claim, the extra wings in the four-winged fruit fly are not “novel structures,” but pathological duplications of body parts already present elsewhere in the fly. The mutations that produce the four-winged fly damage a gene that normally enables the fly to develop “balancers”--tiny structures behind the wings that help to stabilize the insect in flight. Unable to form balancers, the mutant fly sprouts a second pair of normal-looking (though not normal-functioning) wings by default. In other words, the mutations lead to a LOSS of important structures, not to “new structures that become available for further experimentation.” (19)

(c) In order for a mutation to provide raw materials for evolution, it must be advantageous to the organism--otherwise, natural selection will tend to eliminate it. Although most mutations are harmful, a mutation occasionally benefits an organism by increasing its resistance to an antibiotic or a pesticide--usually by damaging a molecule that would otherwise react with the antibiotic or pesticide. Such mutations, however, affect only single molecules, while Darwinian evolution requires changes in anatomy as well as biochemistry. But advantageous anatomical mutations are never observed. The four-winged fruit fly is a case in point: The second set of wings lacks flight muscles, so the useless appendages interfere with flying and mating, and the mutant fly cannot survive long outside the laboratory. Similar mutations in other genes also produce various anatomical deformations, but they are harmful, too. In 1963, Harvard evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr wrote that the resulting mutants “are such evident freaks that these monsters can be designated only as ‘hopeless.’ They are so utterly unbalanced that they would not have the slightest chance of escaping elimination” through natural selection. So the NCSE’s claim that four-winged fruit flies “are a vivid example of one way mutation can provide variation for natural selection to work on” is false. (20)

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My Question: HUMAN ORIGINS. Why are artists’ drawings of ape-like humans used to justify materialistic claims that we are just animals and our existence is a mere accident--when fossil experts cannot even agree on who our supposed ancestors were or what they looked like?

NCSE’s Answer: Drawings of humans and our ancestors illustrate the general outline of human ancestry, about which there is considerable agreement, even if new discoveries continually add to the complexity of the account. The notion that such drawings are used to “justify materialistic claims” is ludicrous and not borne out by an examination of textbook treatments of human evolution.

My Response in Outline:

(a) The field of human origins is actually one of the most contentious in biology, because individual researchers interpret the relatively meager evidence on the basis of different biases and preconceptions.

(b) Darwin’s followers--like Darwin himself--agree that humans evolved from ape-like animals. This theoretical consensus, however, owes less to the evidence than to materialistic philosophy.

(c) One consequence of this philosophy is the claim that there has been no purpose or direction in the history of life. Many biology textbooks promote this view and use drawings of ape-like humans to convince students that we are no exception to it.

My Response in Detail:

(a) Contrary the NCSE’s claim of “considerable agreement,” the field of human origins (paleoanthropology) is actually one of the most contentious in biology. According to experts in the field, this is because of subjective interpretations of the relatively meager evidence. Berkeley evolutionary biologist F. Clark Howell wrote in 1996: “There is no encompassing theory of [human] evolution... Alas, there never really has been.” According to Howell, the field is characterized by “narrative treatments” based on little evidence, so “it is probably true that an encompassing scenario” of human evolution “is beyond our grasp, now if not forever.” Arizona State University paleoanthropologist Geoffrey Clark was equally pessimistic in 1997: “Scientists have been trying to arrive at a consensus about modern human origins for more than a century. Why haven’t they been successful?” Clark is convinced it is because paleoanthropologists proceed from different “biases, preconceptions and assumptions.” And in 1999 Henry Gee, chief science writer for Nature, pointed out that all the evidence for human evolution “between about 10 and 5 million years ago--several thousand generations of living creatures--can be fitted into a small box.” According to Gee, the conventional picture of human evolution as lines of ancestry and descent is “a completely human invention created after the fact, shaped to accord with human prejudices.” (21)

(b) Of course, Darwin’s followers--like Darwin himself--agree that humans evolved from ape-like animals. This agreement, however, represents a theoretical consensus. It does not emerge from the evidence--not the meager evidence for human origins, nor (as we have seen) the evidence from four-winged fruit flies, Darwin’s finches, peppered moths, vertebrate embryos, comparative anatomy, or the fossil record of the animal phyla. On what, then, is this theoretical consensus based?

(c) It seems to me that it is based largely on a philosophical commitment--specifically, a commitment to materialism, the philosophical doctrine that the physical universe is the only reality; God, spirit and mind are illusions. One consequence of this doctrine is the claim that there has been no purpose or direction in the history of life. According to the NCSE, the notion that textbooks use drawings of supposed human ancestors to justify this claim is “ludicrous.” Yet Guttman’s, Biology (1999) tells students that living things have developed “just by chance,” by a roll of the “cosmic dice,” through “the action of random evolutionary forces.” Miller and Levine’s Biology (5th Edition, 2000) asserts that “evolution works without plan or purpose,” so “evolution is random and undirected.” Purves, Sadava, Orians and Heller’s Life: The Science of Biology (6th Edition, 2001) states that “evolution is not directed toward a final goal or state.” And all three of these textbooks include fanciful drawings of ape-like humans that help to convince students we are no exception to the rule of purposelessness.

Some biology textbooks use other kinds of illustrations as well as interviews with famous Darwinists to persuade students that human beings are merely accidental by-products of purposeless natural processes. Raven and Johnson’s Biology (5th Edition, 1999) depicts a speculative reconstruction of the famous “Lucy” fossil after treating students to an interview with Harvard professor Stephen Jay Gould, who tells them: “Humans represent just one tiny, largely fortuitous, and late-arising twig on the enormously arborescent bush of life.” Campbell, Reece and Mitchell’s Biology (5th Edition, 1999) uses drawings of reconstructed fossil skulls rather than whole animals, and features an interview with Oxford professor Richard Dawkins, who declares: “Natural selection is a bewilderingly simple idea. And yet what it explains is the whole of life, the diversity of life, the complexity of life, the apparent design of life”--including human beings, who “are fundamentally not exceptional because we came from the same evolutionary source as every other species.” Our existence was not planned, however, because natural selection is “totally blind to the future”--the “blind watchmaker.” For further reading, students are referred to Dawkins’s book of that name, in which he writes: “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.” (22)

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My Question: EVOLUTION A FACT? Why are we told that Darwin’s theory of evolution is a scientific fact--even though many of its claims are based on misrepresentations of the facts?

NCSE’s Answer: What does Wells mean by “Darwin’s theory of evolution”? In the last century, some of what Darwin originally proposed has been augmented by more modern scientific understanding of inheritance (genetics), development, and other processes that affect evolution. What remains unchanged is that similarities and differences among living things on Earth over time and space display a pattern that is best explained by evolutionary theory. Wells’s “10 Questions” fails to demonstrate a pattern of evolutionary biologists’ “misrepresenting the facts.”

My Response in Outline:

(a) Darwin called his theory “descent with modification.” Defenders of the theory often refer to descent from a common ancestor as a “fact,” and reserve the term “theory” for ideas about the mechanisms of modification. This distinction is found in most biology textbooks that deal with evolution.

(b) Yet some of the best evidence for the “fact” of evolution comes from the fossil record, homology, and embryology--and as we have seen, there are serious problems with all three. The claim that evolution is a fact, like the claim that humans evolved from ape-like ancestors, owes more to materialistic philosophy than to empirical science.

(c) If anything demonstrates “a pattern of evolutionary biologists’ ‘misrepresenting the facts’,” it is the NCSE’s evasive and false answers to my Ten Questions.

My Response in Detail:

(a) Darwin called his theory “descent with modification.” He wrote in 1859: “I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings” which lived in the remote past, and he considered natural selection “the main but not exclusive means of modification.” Thus from the very beginning the theory of biological evolution has had two elements: the pattern of descent from a common ancestor, and the processes by which descendants have been modified. As the NCSE points out, ideas about the processes of evolution have been augmented by modern research, but the idea of an underlying pattern of descent from a universal common ancestor has remained unchanged since Darwin’s time. Defenders of Darwin’s theory often refer to universal common ancestry as a “fact,” reserving the term “theory” for ideas about process. (23)

(b) This distinction is found in most biology textbooks that deal with evolution. For example, Futuyma’s Evolutionary Biology (3rd Edition, 1998) tells students: “Descent with modification from common ancestors is a scientific fact, that is, a hypothesis so well supported by evidence that we take it to be true. The theory of evolution, on the other hand, is a complex body of statements, well supported but still incomplete, about the causes of evolution.” Guttman’s Biology (1999) makes the same distinction: “The concept of evolution actually has two faces--one fact, one theory. If we ask how all the organisms on Earth have reached their present forms, the answer is that they have evolved. This answer is based on such an enormous, coherent body of evidence that we must take it as a fact. By contrast, the other face of evolution, the complex body of ideas about how evolution occurs, is a theory.” According to Audesirk, Audesirk and Byers’s Life On Earth (2nd Edition, 2000), evolution means that “modern organisms descended, with modification, from pre-existing life-forms.” The book then asserts: “Virtually all biologists consider evolution to be a fact. Although debates still rage over the mechanisms of evolutionary change, exceedingly few biologists dispute that evolution occurs. Why? Because an overwhelming body of evidence permits no other conclusion.” Yet the textbooks claim that some of the best evidence for the “fact” of evolution comes from the fossil record, homology, and embryology--and as we have seen, there are serious problems with all three. Why, then, are we still told that evolution is a fact? (24)

(c) It seems to me that this claim, like the claim that humans evolved from ape-like ancestors, owes more to materialistic philosophy than to empirical science. Audesirk, Audesirk and Byers’s Life On Earth (2nd Edition, 2000) tells students: “Over the course of human history, two approaches have been taken to the study of life and other natural phenomena. The first assumes that some events happen through the intervention of supernatural forces…. In contrast, science adheres to the principle of natural causality: All events can be traced to natural causes.” The claim that “all events can be traced to natural causes” is not a methodological statement limiting science to the study of natural phenomena, but a sweeping metaphysical statement about the whole of reality: It is an affirmation of materialism. Guttman’s Biology (1999), as we saw above, promotes materialism in its statements that evolution is purposeless and undirected. And Futuyma’s Evolutionary Biology (3rd Edition, 1998) tells upper division and graduate students: “By coupling undirected, purposeless variation to the blind, uncaring process of natural selection, Darwin made theological or spiritual explanations of the life processes superfluous.” Futuyma concludes that it was Darwin’s theory of evolution, together with Marx’s view of history and Freud’s view of human nature “that provided a crucial plank to the platform of mechanism and materialism” that “has since been the stage of most Western thought.” (25)

(d) According to the NCSE, my Ten Questions fail to “demonstrate a pattern of evolutionary biologists’ ‘misrepresenting the facts’.” Yet the NCSE’s evasive and false answers to my questions clearly demonstrate such a pattern. The NCSE’s evasions include: using “major groups” to denote vertebrate classes rather than animal phyla, thus side-stepping the challenge to Darwin’s theory posed by the Cambrian explosion; listing embryos from only one vertebrate class to give the illusion that similarities among the embryos of ALL classes provide evidence for common ancestry; and comparing staged photos of peppered moths that misrepresent the truth to historical re-enactments of events that actually happened. Furthermore, the NCSE makes numerous false claims about the scientific evidence, such as the following: the Miller-Urey experiment succeeded in showing how organic molecules might have been produced on the early Earth (it didn’t); when the experiment is repeated using a more realistic mixture of gasses, it still produces most of the same building blocks (it doesn’t); fish do not appear in the Cambrian explosion (they do); the early stages of vertebrate embryos are generally more similar than later stages (they’re not); and anatomical mutations in fruit flies produce novel structures that provide raw materials for evolution (they don’t). The NCSE also makes statements about biology textbooks that are demonstrably false, for example: textbooks do not rely on faked embryo drawings; very few textbooks feature the four-winged fruit fly; and textbooks do not use drawings of ape-like humans in the context of promoting materialistic philosophy. Simple examination shows that many textbooks do these very things. To see a pattern of evolutionary biologists’ misrepresenting the facts, one needs only to read the NCSE’s answers to my “Ten Questions To Ask Your Biology Teacher About Evolution.”

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Conclusion:

The NCSE introduces its answers to my Ten Questions by calling many of my claims “incorrect or misleading,” and by maintaining that they are “intended only to create unwarranted doubts in students’ minds about the validity of evolution as good science.” The evasions and falsehoods listed above, however, make it clear that it is the NCSE’s answers that are incorrect or misleading. If students have doubts about the scientific validity of evolution, their doubts are amply warranted not only by the systematic pattern of misrepresentations in biology textbooks, but also by the false and evasive statements the NCSE makes in defense of those misrepresentations.

Good science is the search for truth, and it searches for truth by comparing theories with the evidence. A good science education should present the evidence truthfully--especially the evidence for and against a theory as influential as Darwin’s. Yet biology textbooks invariably present this evidence with a pro-Darwin spin, indoctrinating students rather than educating them. It seems that the National Center for Science Education, despite its title, wants students to inherit the spin.

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REFERENCES

Note: More detailed information on all ten questions is available in my book, Icons of Evolution (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2000; paperback edition 2002).



(1) The relevant page numbers in the cited textbooks are: Campbell, Reece and Mitchell’s Biology (5th Edition, 1999), p. 494; Mader’s Biology (6th Edition, 1998), p. 325; Starr and Taggart’s Biology: The Unity and Diversity of Life (8th Edition, 1998), p. 335; Schraer and Stoltze’s Biology: The Study of Life (7th Edition, 1999), pp. 590-591; Guttman’s Biology (1999), p. 603; Audesirk, Audesirk and Byers’s Life On Earth (2nd Edition, 2000), p. 271; Purves, Sadava, Orians and Heller’s Life: The Science of Biology (6th Edition, 2001), p. 451; Alberts, Bray, Lewis, Raff, Roberts and Watson’s Molecular Biology of the Cell (3rd Edition, 1994), p. 4; Futuyma’s Evolutionary Biology (3rd Edition, 1998), p. 167; Freeman and Herron’s Evolutionary Analysis (2nd Edition, 2001), p. 481.



(2) For the consensus among geochemists that the Miller-Urey experiment did not realistically simulate the Earth’s early atmosphere, see Heinrich D. Holland, “Model for the Evolution of the Earth’s Atmosphere,” pp. 447-477 in A. E. J. Engel, Harold L. James and B. F. Leonard (editors), Petrologic Studies: A Volume in Honor of A. F. Buddington (Geological Society of America, 1962), pp. 448-449; Philip H. Abelson, “Chemical Events on the Primitive Earth,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 55 (1966), 1365-1372; Marcel Florkin, “Ideas and Experiments in the Field of Prebiological Chemical Evolution,” Comprehensive Biochemistry 29B (1975), 231-260, pp. 241-242; and Sidney W. Fox and Klaus Dose, Molecular Evolution and the Origin of Life, Revised Edition (New York: Marcel Dekker, 1977), pp. 43, 74-76. Concerning the failure of the Miller-Urey experiment when a realistic “atmosphere” is used, see Gordon Schlesinger and Stanley L. Miller, “Prebiotic Synthesis in Atmospheres Containing CH4, CO, and CO2: I. Amino Acids,” Journal of Molecular Evolution 19 (1983), 376-382; and John Horgan, “In the Beginning...,” Scientific American (February 1991), 116-126, p. 121.



(3) Nicholas Wade, “Life’s Origins Get Murkier and Messier,” The New York Times (Tuesday, June 13, 2000), pp. D1-D2.



(4) Philippe Janvier, “Catching the first fish,” Nature 402 (November 4, 1999), pp. 21-22; D-G. Shu, H-L. Luo, S. Conway Morris, X-L. Zhang, S-X. Hu, L. Chen, J. Han, M. Zhu, Y. Li and L-Z. Chen, “Lower Cambrian vertebrates from south China,” Nature 402 (1999), 42-46; Jun-Yuan Chen, Di-Ying Huang and Chia-Wei Li, “An early Cambrian craniate-like chordate,” Nature 402 (1999), 518-522; Fred Heeren, “A Little Fish Challenges a Big Giant,” The Boston Globe (May 30, 2000), E1.



(5) James W. Valentine, Stanley M. Awramik, Philip W. Signor and Peter M. Sadler, “The Biological Explosion at the Precambrian-Cambrian Boundary,” Evolutionary Biology 25 (1991), 279-356; Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (1st Edition, 1859), Chap. IX.



(6) The relevant page numbers in the cited textbooks are: Starr and Taggart’s Biology: The Unity and Diversity of Life (8th Edition, 1998), pp. 318-319; Johnson’s Biology: Visualizing Life (1998), p. 178; Campbell, Reece and Mitchell’s Biology (5th Edition, 1999), p. 424; Raven and Johnson’s Biology (5th Edition, 1999), pp. 412, 416; Audesirk, Audesirk and Byers’s Life On Earth (2nd Edition, 2000), p. 236.



(7) Michael Lynch, “The Age and Relationships of the Major Animal Phyla,” Evolution 53 (1999), 319-325, p. 323.



(8) William W. Ballard, “Problems of gastrulation: real and verbal,” BioScience 26 (1976), 36-39, p. 38; Richard P. Elinson, “Change in developmental patterns: embryos of amphibians with large eggs,” pp. 1-21 in R. A. Raff and E. C. Raff (editors), Development as an Evolutionary Process, vol. 8 (New York: Alan R. Liss, 1987), p. 3; Rudolf A. Raff, The Shape of Life: Genes, Development, and the Evolution of Animal Form (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 208; and M. K. Richardson, J. Hanken, M. L. Gooneratne, C. Pieau, A. Raynaud, L. Selwood, and G. M. Wright, “There is no highly conserved embryonic stage in the vertebrates: implications for current theories of evolution and development,” Anatomy and Embryology 196 (1997), 91-106.



(9) E. M. del Pino and R. P. Elinson, “A novel developmental pattern for frogs: Gastrulation produces an embryonic disk,” Nature 306 (1983), 589-591; James Hanken et al., “Cranial Ontogeny in the Direct-Developing Frog, Eleutherodactylus coqui (Anura: Leptodactylidae), Analyzed Using Whole-Mount Immunohistochemistry,” Journal of Morphology 211 (1992), 95-118.



(10) The relevant page numbers in the cited textbooks are: Starr and Taggart’s Biology: The Unity and Diversity of Life (8th Edition, 1998), p. 317; Guttman’s Biology (1999), p. 718; Biggs, Kapicka and Lundgren’s Biology: The Dynamics of Life (1998), p. 433; Schraer and Stoltze’s Biology: The Study of Life (7th Edition, 1999), p. 583; Miller and Levine’s Biology (5th Edition, 2000), p. 283; Futuyma’s Evolutionary Biology (3rd Edition, 1998), p. 653; Alberts, Bray, Lewis, Raff, Roberts and Watson’s Molecular Biology of the Cell (3rd Edition, 1994), pp. 32-33. The Gould quotation is from pp. 44-46 of his essay, “Abscheulich! Atrocious!” Natural History (March, 2000), pp. 42-49.



(11) The relevant page numbers in the cited textbooks are: Starr and Taggart’s Biology: The Unity and Diversity of Life (8th Edition, 1998), p. 278; Schraer and Stoltze’s Biology: The Study of Life (7th Edition, 1999), p. 761; Mader’s Biology (6th Edition, 1998), p. 296; Raven and Johnson’s Biology (5th Edition, 1999), p. 413.



(12) Henry Gee, In Search of Deep Time (New York: The Free Press, 1999), p. 23.



(13) See Kevin Padian and Luis M. Chiappe, “The origin and early evolution of birds,” Biological Reviews 73 (1998), 1-42. For a thorough and expert critique of the view advocated by Padian and other cladists, see Alan Feduccia, The Origin and Evolution of Birds (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 45-91.



(14) Theodore D. Sargent, Craig D. Millar and David M. Lambert, “The ‘Classical’ Explanation of Industrial Melanism: Assessing the Evidence,” Evolutionary Biology 30 (1998), 299-322, pp. 318; Jerry A. Coyne, “Not black and white,” a review of Michael Majerus’s Melanism: Evolution in Action, Nature 396 (1998), 35-36. See also Jonathan Wells, “Second Thoughts about Peppered Moths,” The Scientist (May 24, 1999), 13



(15) The relevant page numbers in the cited textbooks are: Johnson’s Biology: Visualizing Life (1998), p. 182; Guttman’s Biology (1999), pp. 35-36; Schraer and Stoltze’s Biology: The Study of Life (7th Edition, 1999), pp. 618-619; Miller and Levine’s Biology (5th Edition, 2000), pp. 297-298; Mader’s Biology (6th Edition, 1998), pp. 11-12, 306.



(16) For details of the Grants’ research, see Peter R. Grant, Ecology and Evolution of Darwin’s Finches (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), and Jonathan Weiner, The Beak of the Finch (New York: Vintage Books, 1994). The Miller-Levine quotation is from Biology: The Living Science (Prentice-Hall, 1998), pp. 254-255. The NAS quotation is from Science and Creationism: A View from the National Academy of Sciences (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1999), “Evidence Supporting Biological Evolution,” p, 2, http://books.nap.edu/html/creationism/evidence.html.



(17) Alan H. Linton, The Times Higher Education Supplement (April 20, 2001), p. 29; Phillip E. Johnson, “The Church of Darwin,” The Wall Street Journal (August 16, 1999), p. A14.



(18) The relevant page numbers in the cited textbooks are: Mader’s Biology (6th Edition, 1998), pp. 304, 921; Raven and Johnson’s Biology (5th Edition, 1999), pp. 394, 1154; Guttman’s Biology (1999), pp. 34, 437; Purves, Sadava, Orians and Heller’s Life: The Science of Biology (6th Edition, 2001), pp. 439-445; Futuyma’s Evolutionary Biology (3rd Edition, 1998), pp. 48-49; Freeman and Herron’s Evolutionary Analysis (2nd Edition, 2001), pp. 588-590.



(19) E. B. Lewis, “A gene complex controlling segmentation in Drosophila,” Nature 276 (1978), 565-570; Mark Peifer & Welcome Bender, “The anterobithorax and bithorax mutations of the bithorax complex,” EMBO Journal 5 (1986), 2293-2303.



(20) On the absence of flight muscles in the second pair of wings, see J. Fernandes, S. E. Celniker, E. B. Lewis & K. VijayRaghavan, “Muscle development in the four-winged Drosophila and the role of the Ultrabithorax gene,” Current Biology 4 (1994), 957-964; Sudipto Roy, L. S. Shashidhara & K. VijayRaghavan, “Muscles in the Drosophila second thoracic segment are patterned independently of autonomous homeotic gene function,” Current Biology 7 (1997), 222-227. The Mayr quotation is from Ernst Mayr, Populations, Species and Evolution, an abridgement of his 1963 book, Animal Species and Evolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), pp. 251-253.



(21) F. Clark Howell, “Thoughts on the Study and Interpretation of the Human Fossil Record,” pp. 1-39 in W. Eric Meikle, F. Clark Howell & Nina G. Jablonski (editors), Contemporary Issues in Human Evolution, Memoir 21 (San Francisco: California Academy of Sciences, 1996), pp. 3, 31; Geoffrey A. Clark, “Through a Glass Darkly: Conceptual Issues in Modern Human Origins Research,” pp. 60-76 in G. A. Clark & C. M. Willermet (editors), Conceptual Issues in Modern Human Origins Research (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1997), pp. 60-62; Henry Gee, In Search of Deep Time: Beyond the Fossil Record to a New History of Life (New York: The Free Press, 1999), pp. 32, 202.



(22) The relevant page numbers in the cited textbooks are: Guttman’s Biology (1999), pp. 36-37, 774-777; Miller and Levine’s Biology (5th Edition, 2000), pp. 658, 762-764; Purves, Sadava, Orians and Heller’s Life: The Science of Biology (6th Edition, 2001), pp. 3, 597-598; Raven and Johnson’s Biology (5th Edition, 1999), pp. 15, 448-450; Campbell, Reece and Mitchell’s Biology (5th Edition, 1999), pp. 412-413, 660. The Dawkins quote is from Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the evidence of evolution reveals a universe without design (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986), p. 6.



(23) The Darwin quotations are from Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (1st Edition, 1859), Introduction and Conclusion.



(24) The relevant page numbers in the cited textbooks are: Futuyma’s Evolutionary Biology (3rd Edition, 1998), p. 15; Guttman’s Biology (1999), p. 8; Audesirk, Audesirk and Byers’s Life On Earth (2nd Edition, 2000), pp. 8-9, 12, 235.



(25) The relevant page numbers in the cited textbooks are: Audesirk, Audesirk and Byers’s Life On Earth (2nd Edition, 2000), pp. 8-9, 12, 235; Guttman’s Biology (1999), pp. 36-37; Futuyma’s Evolutionary Biology (3rd Edition, 1998), p. 5.

Posted by Casey Luskin at 10:22 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Danio, guest blogger at Pharyngula, has a post advocating the denial of legal protection for health care workers who, because of religious beliefs or other moral objections, refuse to provide services such as abortions or contraception. It’s hard to believe that any person with even a modicum of respect for individual rights would support taking legal sanction against physicians, nurses, and pharmacists who, because of genuine deeply held religious belief or other moral principles, believe that such acts as abortion or contraception are immoral. From the standpoint of traditional medical ethics, healthcare professionals are only under legal compulsion to provide care in a life-saving emergency. The controversial "treatments" in dispute are not emergencies, and are certainly not life-saving. That abortion and contraception aren't life-saving is actually the point of the doctors, nurses, and pharmacists who are acting on conscience.

Danio quotes HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt, who supports the conscience protections of the federal policy:

Is the fear here that so many doctors will refuse that it will somehow make it difficult for a woman to get an abortion? That hasn't happened, but what if it did? Wouldn't that be an important and legitimate social statement?...Does the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association believe we can protect by Constitution, statute and practice rights of free speech, race, religion, and abortion—but not conscience?

Danio replies:

"Social statement?" I can scarcely get my mind around the fact that he is so openly, unapologetically endorsing a policy in which pious opinion would trump secular law.

Danio misses the irony. Pharyngula's own P.Z. Myers has been the beneficiary of lavish free-speech protection, in which his own peculiar "pious" opinion trumps secular law.

To be specific, the University of Minnesota's regulations prohibiting anti-religious bias:

Expressions of disrespectful bias, hate, harassment or hostility against an individual, group or their property because of the individual or group's actual or perceived race, color, creed, religion…can be forms of discrimination. Expressions vary, and can be in the form of language, words, signs, symbols, threats, or actions that could potentially cause alarm, anger, fear, or resentment in others…even when presented as a joke.

Myers, an associate professor at the University of Minnesota, Morris, has been publishing atheist ideology and anti-Christian hatred on Pharyngula for several years while on the Minnesota public payroll. In all likelihood, he's used some public property or publicly financed time to disseminate his spew. Recently, he desecrated the Eucharist by obtaining a consecrated Host, nailing it, throwing it in the garbage, and posting a photograph of it on Pharyngula. One doubts that his prolific bigotry is produced entirely on his own time and resources; the good taxpayers of Minnesota, including devout Catholic taxpayers, likely subsidize this bigot's performance art.

Myers has been protected from the legal consequences of his malicious desecration of the Eucharist. He continues to teach, collect his paycheck, and publish hate. All things considered, I do believe that it is better that he is free to act and express his opinion, regardless of how repellent I (and many others) find his actions. Freedom of expression, whether it is expression of anti-Christian bigotry or a belief in the sanctity of human life or a disagreement with Darwinian orthodoxy in a classroom, is our most important freedom, and I will defend it even for those with whom I most strongly disagree. In fact, I defend it particularly for those with whom I disagree. Yet Myers and his minions, who are obvious beneficiaries of the right of freedom of expression, demand the firing or silencing of scientists and teachers who question Darwinian orthodoxy, and now they have the audacity to demand that the law impose legal and professional sanctions on Christian doctors who in good conscience would not abort a baby.

In the view of Myers and his acolytes, the Constitution protects their own publicly financed dissemination of anti-Christian hatred, but it does not protect teachers' expression of doubts about Darwinism in public schools or doctors' expression of religiously motivated acts of conscience.

Myers and his minions are bigots. And censors. And hypocrites.

Posted by Michael Egnor at 10:36 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

In his "29+ Evidences for Macroevolution" on TalkOrigins, Douglas Theobald claims that "Endogenous retroviruses provide yet another example of molecular sequence evidence for universal common descent." The presumption behind his argument is that endogenous retroviruses (ERVs) are functionless stretches of "junk" DNA that persist because they are "selfish"—but they have no function for the organism. If we find the same ERVs in the same genetic loci in different species of primates, Theobald concludes they document common ancestry. But what if ERVs do perform important genetic functions? Even theistic evolutionist Francis Collins acknowledges that genetic similarity "alone does not, of course, prove a common ancestor" because a designer could have "used successful design principles over and over again." (The Language of God, pg. 134.) The force of Theobald’s argument thus depends upon the premise that ERVs are selfish genetic "junk" that do not necessarily perform any useful function for their host.

In contrast, ID proponents would predict function for ERVs. This isn’t because ID has an inherent quarrel with common descent—it doesn’t. Rather, ID predicts function because the basis for ID’s predictions is observations of how intelligent agents design things, and intelligent agents tend to design objects that perform some kind of function. As William Dembski wrote in 1998, "If, on the other hand, organisms are designed, we expect DNA, as much as possible, to exhibit function." It seems that the expectations of ID are turning out to be right.

A recent 2008 paper, "Retroviral promoters in the human genome," in the journal Bioinformatics (Vol. 24(14):1563–1567 (2008)) discusses the fact that "Endogenous retrovirus (ERV) elements have been shown to contribute promoter sequences that can initiate transcription of adjacent human genes. However, the extent to which retroviral sequences initiate transcription within the human genome is currently unknown." The article thus "analyzed genome sequence and high-throughput expression data to systematically evaluate the presence of retroviral promoters in the human genome."

The results were striking:

We report the existence of 51,197 ERV-derived promoter sequences that initiate transcription within the human genome, including 1743 cases where transcription is initiated from ERV sequences that are located in gene proximal promoter or 5' untranslated regions (UTRs).

[…]

Our analysis revealed that retroviral sequences in the human genome encode tens-of-thousands of active promoters; transcribed ERV sequences correspond to 1.16% of the human genome sequence and PET tags that capture transcripts initiated from ERVs cover 22.4% of the genome. These data suggest that ERVs may regulate human transcription on a large scale.

(Andrew B. Conley, Jittima Piriyapongsa and I. King Jordan, "Retroviral promoters in the human genome," Bioinformatics, Vol. 24(14):1563–1567 (2008).)

It seems that Richard Sternberg was correct when he predicted 5 years ago that "the selfish DNA narrative and allied frameworks must join the other ‘icons’ of neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory that, despite their variance with empirical evidence, nevertheless persist in the literature." (Richard Sternberg, "On the Roles of Repetitive DNA Elements in the Context of a Unified Genomic–Epigenetic System," Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Vol. 981: 154–88 (2002).)

Posted by Casey Luskin at 9:44 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

This is the first in a series of posts in which I will discuss the medical and ethical aspects of persistent vegetative state (PVS). As I noted in an earlier post, I believe that the emergence of PVS as an accepted medical diagnosis is in part a consequence of the emergence of strict materialistic theories of the mind in the late 20th century, especially the theory called "functionalism," which is the theory that the mind is what the brain does, in the same way that running a program is what a computer does. If the mind is entirely caused by the brain, in a way analogous to the running of a software program on a computer's hardware, it stands to reason that there would be situations in which damage to the brain would cause the "mind program" to irreversibly crash. This leads to rather obvious ethical implications. Ideas have consequences, and the materialist understanding of the mind has had direct and disturbing consequences for the medical treatment of people handicapped by severe brain injuries. I will explore this connection between philosophy of the mind and clinical medicine in a future post.

PVS came to wide public attention with the death in 2005 by dehydration and starvation of Terri Schiavo, a young woman with severe brain damage caused by a cardiac arrest (probably from an electrolyte imbalance) in 1990. She died because her feeding tube was removed by court order at the request of her husband, who claimed that she had told him that she would have wanted to be deprived of nourishment under these circumstances. The deprivation of water and nourishment to a handicapped person, even with the pretext of accommodating that person's wishes, obviously raises ethical issues, and I'll discuss them in future posts. I'll address primarily the medical and neurological issues in this post.

The first question to ask is this: what do we mean by "consciousness"? What we commonly understand as "consciousness" has two components: arousal and cognitive content. Arousal merely refers to the appearance of wakefulness. The eyes are open, the person may move in various ways, etc. Cognitive content refers to the subjective (first-person) aspects of the mind, such as perceptions, thoughts, beliefs, desires, intentions, etc. These subjective states have been called "intentional states," and intentionality is a hallmark — really the hallmark — of a conscious mind. In this sense, it should be noted that sleep isn’t really unconsciousness. We don’t show arousal (our eyes are closed, etc), but we can have intentional states (in a dream, we can have fears, hopes, beliefs, etc.). The mind is still working, even in sleep.

Coma is a rather vague term, referring to the initial loss of arousal after an injury to the brain. In actual medical practice, it is often defined according to the Glasgow Coma Scale, a measurement of mental status developed several decades ago to provide accuracy and consistency in the evaluation of patients with altered mental status. It consists of examination of motor response (following commands, flexing the arms, etc.), verbal response (talking, grunting, etc.), and eye opening (spontaneous, only to noxious stimuli, etc). "Points" are assigned to each category. The most total points a patient can get is 15; the least, 3. Coma is generally defined as a Glasgow Coma Score of less than 8. It is important to note that the assessment of coma is all behavioral. We have no access to other peoples internal mental states except by behavior — movement — of some sort. Our diagnosis of coma depends entirely on the ability of a patient to communicate through movement in some fashion. The diagnosis of coma is unreliable in direct proportion to the impairment of the patient's ability to move and communicate.

Coma, understood as a lack of arousal, is always temporary. It has long been recognized that all brain-injured people, even those who are initially in deep coma, will eventually (after several weeks or months) exhibit arousal. They will open their eyes, have sleep and wake cycles, and appear to be alert. Most people go on to improve more, often completely, but some continue in some form of this "vigilant" state indefinitely. These states of vigilance vary considerably from person to person, but they often show little external evidence of cognitive content — of an internal mental state. Decades ago, these eclectic conditions were called various names: "coma vigil," "akinetic mutism," and "apallic syndrome." Sometimes people would, in time, wake up from these states. I've seen a number of patients wake up after six months or a year; the longest duration of coma vigil with subsequent recovery that I've seen was four years. The patient, a young man with a head injury from a car accident, woke up rather suddenly one night and began talking quite coherently and asking about his family. I was the resident on call, and when the nurses told me, I thought it was a practical joke. The patient made a good recovery. However, such recovery from several years of unresponsiveness is uncommon.

In the mid 20th century, the medical description of prolonged lack of apparent conscious content following brain injury was a bit eclectic. In 1972, neurosurgeon Bryan Jennett and neurologist Fred Plum suggested the use of the diagnostic term "persistent vegetative state" (PVS) to describe these various states of absence of discernable cognition. PVS incorporated the earlier diagnoses of "akinetic mutism," etc. Jennett and Plum suggested that central to the diagnosis of PVS was a wakeful unconscious state — "wakefulness without awareness," which is arousal without cognition. PVS was the diagnosis that a brain injured patient had motor functions such as eye opening, non-purposeful movements of limbs, etc., but she didn't have cognitive content, such as perceptions, beliefs, desires, etc. Succinctly, she had a body and a (damaged) brain, but no mind.

The diagnosis of PVS became widely used, although the diagnostic criteria varied a bit, and in 1994 a Multi-Society Task Force made up of representatives of the American Academy of Neurology, the Child Neurology Society, the American Neurological Association, the American Association of Neurological Surgeons, and the American Academy of Pediatrics produced a Consensus Statement on the medical aspects of PVS. The criteria for the diagnosis were:

The vegetative state can be diagnosed according to the following criteria; (1) no evidence of awareness of self or environment and an inability to interact with others; (2) no evidence of sustained, reproducible, purposeful, or voluntary behavioural responses to visual, auditory, tactile, or noxious stimuli; (3) no evidence of language comprehension or expression; (4) intermittent wakefulness manifested by the presence of sleep-wake cycles; (5) sufficiently preserved hypothalamic and brain-stem autonomic function to permit survival with medical and nursing care; (6) bowel and bladder incontinence; and (7) variably preserved cranial-nerve reflexes (pupillary, oculophalic, corneal, vestibulo-ocular, and gag) and spinal reflexes..... A wakeful unconscious state that lasts longer than a few weeks is referred to as a persistent vegetative state.

Note two things critical to this diagnosis: first, objective ancillary tests such as CT, EEG, and MRI are not part of the diagnostic criteria. The diagnosis is established by bedside examination. Ancillary tests are of some help in confirming the presence of severe brain damage, but this is usually obvious from the context. Ancillary tests have no direct bearing on the diagnosis of PVS as currently defined.

Second, and of great importance, is the fact that all of the diagnostic criteria for PVS are behavioral, in the sense that the diagnosis depends critically on the ability of the patient to communicate his internal mental state. Paralysis and muscle incoordination intrinsically diminish the reliability of the diagnosis.

In the media and even among physicians PVS is often confused with other conditions such as brain death. Here's a list of neurological conditions that can be confused with PVS:

Brain death
Brain death is biological death of the entire brain. There is no movement (except for spinal reflexes), no breathing, no eye opening. There are no brain waves, and there is no blood flowing to the brain. The heart may beat and some of the body organs may work, but the entire brain is biologically dead. All patients who are brain dead must be maintained on a respirator if the heart is to be kept beating.

In the United States, brain death is legally the same as death. Brain dead people are dead. Organs may be removed for transplantation, and the body may be removed from the ventilator.

Terri Schiavo wasn't brain dead, or even close to it. Brain death has nothing to do with PVS.

PVS
As noted above, PVS is a state of arousal without awareness. It is, in a sense, "mind death," in that the brain is still biologically alive but there is no evidence of subjective mental processes. In this sense, PVS eliminates the personhood of the patient, because the property of "personhood" necessarily implies intentions, beliefs, will, etc. An entity without a mind cannot be a person in any meaningful sense. PVS is the only medical diagnosis that alters the personhood of a patient.

Because the identification of a mind in a brain-damaged person depends entirely on behavior, the very brain damage that raises the question of PVS diminishes the reliability of the exam that would establish the diagnosis.

PVS cannot be diagnosed in a person who, due to damage to motor systems necessary for purposeful movement, cannot communicate.

Minimally Conscious State
Minimally conscious state (MCS) is a recent addition to the diagnosis associated with brain damage. MCS is essentially "PVS except…". It is a state of severe brain damage in which there is some small but clear evidence of mental processing. As with PVS, it is not clear how much of the apparent loss of evidence for mental processing is due to actual loss of mental processing and how much is due to impairment of communication — motor behavior — due to profound brain damage.

Locked-in state
Locked-in state is a profound paralysis of all muscles except the muscles that control vertical movements of the eyes and sometimes blinking. It is usually due to a stroke in the pons. Patients are often mentally normal. Their only method of communication is blinking and vertical eye movements. They can signal yes and no to questions.

If the examiner does not notice the eye movements, or if the patient does not realize that he can communicate this way, the patient would be indistinguishable, on bedside exam, from a patient with PVS.

Coma
As noted above, coma is a rather vague term meaning loss of arousal. It too is diagnosed entirely by behavioral criteria, usually using the Glasgow Coma Scale, as discussed above.

Cerebral palsy
Cerebral palsy is a generic term for congenital and non-progressive brain injury, often caused by cerebral hypoxia/ischemia (lack of oxygen and blood flow to the brain). People with cerebral palsy have predominately motor disability ("palsy" means paralysis). They have varying degrees of paralysis, spasticity, chorea, athetosis, and ballismus (the last three are involuntary movements associated with the brain damage).

There is generally relative preservation of cognition; many people with cerebral palsy are intellectually normal, and some are quite bright. It is often difficult to assess their mental state, because of their profound difficulty in communicating. They frequently cannot speak, and purposeful movement is very difficult.

Many educational strategies, using computers and other aids, have allowed people with cerebral palsy to communicate very well and to enjoy an education and a rich social life.

The closer one examines the diagnostic issues involved in PVS, the more clear it is that PVS is in many ways a problematic diagnosis. The diagnosis of PVS relies entirely on the patient's ability to communicate internal mental states to the examining neurologist. Yet severe brain damage intrinsically limits the patient's ability to move and speak. Patients in whom the diagnosis of PVS is made are precisely those people in whom the assessment of mental state is most unreliable.

Furthermore, PVS is the only medical diagnosis that, by denying that the patient has a mind, denies the personhood of the patient. Thankfully, many people in PVS are still treated with respect as persons by their families and caregivers, but that respect is conferred despite, not because of, the diagnosis of PVS.

My interlocutor on this topic, Yale neurologist Steven Novella, has posted several essays in defense of what was done to Terri Schiavo. I'll address the issues he raised, such as the reliability of the diagnosis of PVS as well as Ms. Schiavo's autopsy findings and the ethical implications of the deprivation of food and water to people diagnosed with PVS in my next several posts.

Posted by Michael Egnor at 11:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Denyse O'Leary has taken fellow Canadian Bob Breakenridge to task in The Calgary Herald for writing a column which, as O'Leary says, "is an excellent illustration of why one should not write about big topics without basic research."

The 2005 Judge Jones decision in Pennsylvania, to which Breakenridge devotes much of his column, has not crimped the worldwide growth of interest in intelligent design. That is no surprise. A judge is not a scientist, and Jones cannot plug gaping holes in Darwin’s theory of evolution. Evolution is—contrary to its (largely) publicly funded zealots— in deep trouble, for a number of reasons.

Breakenridge informs us that in a recent Angus Reid poll, "A shockingly low 37 per cent of Albertans supported the position that humans beings evolved from less advanced life forms over millions of years." Well, good, let’s drive the numbers lower still. That position is an article of atheist dogma. Evidence for it is hailed as a truth we must all embrace; evidence against it is shrugged off as a temporary setback. Try doubting the dogma, and you could end up starring in Ben Stein’s Expelled, Part II.

Breakenridge also frets, "An even greater number of Albertans—40 percent—agreed that humans were created by God within the last 10,000 years." That's easy to explain. It was the only other option (barring "don’t know"). The ever-popular "God uses evolution" choice wasn't offered.

Forced to choose between excluding God and including him, I'd pick option two, even though I accept NASA's estimate of our Earth’s age (4.5 billion years) and consider common ancestry a reasonable idea.

My guess is, Albertans diverged from the national norm because they considered the question more carefully than some folk.

Posted by Anika Smith at 10:20 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

[Ed: This post was written by a legal intern at Discovery Institute who has chosen to post anonymously.]

The Establishment clause of the United States Constitution states that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof […]." Today the popular argument against intelligent design (ID) is that it is just an extension of creationism, which implicates ID as a religious theory. The argument begins when proponents of neo-Darwinian evolution attempt to use some definition of science to disqualify ID from being a scientific theory. Intelligent design is then equated with religion through the assertion that if the theory is not science, then it must be religious in nature. Even Judge Jones adopted this dubious logic in the Kitzmiller ruling, holding that "since ID is not science, the conclusion is inescapable that the only real effect of the ID Policy is the advancement of religion." As the argument goes, if ID is religious in nature then it violates the Establishment Clause, just like creationism. Consequently, the "ID = religion" argument has become the default argument used by ID's opponents. The problem with this argument is that ID is actually a secular-based scientific theory. Unfortunately, materialistic theories of evolution have become so ingrained in the scientific community that any alternate view is immediately disregarded as "unscientific," this bringing the "ID = religion" argument to its starting point.

An example of this logic is found in Anne Marie Lofaso's Pierce Law Review article, "Does Changing the Definition of Science Solve the Establishment Clause Problem for Teaching Intelligent Designs as Science in Public Schools? Doing an End-Run Around the Constitution." Lofaso argues that "it is now generally well-accepted that creation-science is religion […] and has been discredited as a scientific theory." (FN 218) Perhaps that's true, but the article then lumps intelligent design into the category of "creation-science." When did creationism become the same thing as intelligent design? Unfortunately, many in the scientific community make this theoretical jump without taking the time to evaluate what they theories really say. Intelligent design is not creationism, and just because ID may be palatable to many creationists does not mean that it is inherently religious.

If I take an apple and an orange and look at them side by side and notice that they are both round in shape and both come from trees, it is not wise to assume that they will taste the same or be identical on the inside. Such is the case with creationism and intelligent design; though they may have similar traits, they are not the same theory. Any scientist who makes the assumption that they are the same has declared to the world that he is a narrow-minded evolutionary puppet. Discovery Institute’s Intelligent Design Briefing Packet for Educators is instructive on this point:

"The theory of intelligent design is simply an effort to empirically detect whether the 'apparent design' in nature acknowledged by virtually all biologists is genuine design (the product of an intelligent cause) or is simply the product of an undirected process such as natural selection acting on random variations. Creationism typically starts with a religious text and tries to see how the findings of science can be reconciled to it. ID starts with the empirical evidence of nature and seeks to ascertain what scientific inferences can be drawn from that evidence. Unlike creationism, the scientific theory of intelligent design does not claim that modern biology can identify whether the intelligent cause detected through science is supernatural. The charge that ID is 'creationism' is a rhetorical strategy on the part of Darwinists who wish to delegitimize ID without actually addressing the merits of its case.

From an Establishment Clause perspective, Lofaso claims that ID has two hurdles to overcome: "First, it must establish itself as science. Second, it must disentangle itself from religion" (p. 271). There are multiples problems with this statement.

Regarding the first hurdle, Lofaso advocates a materialistic definition of science that wrongly excludes intelligent design. She uses such a bloated definition of the "scientific method" in order to dogmatically exclude any alternative to evolution from the classroom: "If the scientific method is taught correctly, there is no confusion in presenting evolution as the dominant scientific theory, and there would be no confusion that evolutionary theories are anything but absolute […]." Yet as I discussed in Part 1, intelligent design meets any standard definition of the scientific method (that leaves off the dead weight of materialist requirements).

Regarding the second hurdle, Lofaso fails to recognize that the "disentanglement" argument, when applied fairly, could have dramatic implications for the teaching of evolution. As David DeWolf, John West, and Casey Luskin argue in "Intelligent Design will Survive Kitzmiller v. Dover" in Montana Law Review, "leading proponents of Darwinian evolution frequently raise the cultural and metaphysical implications of the theory in their writings" and therefore:

"Judge Jones set forth a double standard by considering how design proponents have interpreted ID within the context of their own religious beliefs, but ignored the fact that evolutionists have done precisely the same thing by interpreting evolution within the context of their religious (or anti-religious) beliefs. ... Not only does this represent a non-neutral treatment of theistic religious motives versus anti-theistic religious motives, but it proposes a rule which, if applied consistently, could even threaten the teaching of evolution." (p. 51, 52)

"While lumping ID with creationism may be a good rhetorical strategy for ID's opponents, it only detracts from an independent and rigorous evaluation of the merits of ID's claims […] Perhaps the most ironic aspect of this debate is that Darwinists are even opposed to the inclusion of ID in the public school curriculum. If there is any fundamental tenet of Darwinism, is it not that competition leads inexorably to progress?" (p. 7)

Posted by Staff at 7:39 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

[Ed: This post was written by a legal intern at Discovery Institute who has chosen to post anonymously.]

In 2006, Martha M. McCarthy wrote an article ("Instruction About the Origin of Humanity: Legal Controversies Evolve") arguing that "concerns have been raised…that if the 'controversy' is taught and ID is actually subjected to scientific criticism, this may 'be more confrontational to students' beliefs than most high school teachers feel is appropriate.'" (FN 68) This misguided statement assumes four things. First, it assumes that students have a set of beliefs on the origin of humanity before they take biology. The second assumption is that high school teachers are the final authority on what is taught in public school science classrooms. The third is that high school students should not be exposed to confrontational ideas; her statement is boldly authoritarian. Finally, she assumes that intelligent design is a mere "belief" and that critiquing it has constitutional implications.

The first assumption, that students have preconceived opinions on origins, is probably correct. Students tend to believe what their parents believe until they decide otherwise, so it is fair to assume that students have some opinion on the issue. Interestingly, in two independent polls cited in the article, 55% and 64% of adults questioned on the issue felt that intelligent design (ID) and creationism should be taught alongside evolution. (FN 57) Other polls have shown that upwards of 75% of Americans support teaching ID. One might deduce that if students tend to believe what their parents believe, and a majority, or perhaps a supermajority, support teaching ID, then teaching these theories is not really confrontational to their beliefs. I have a strong suspicion that Ms. McCarthy objects to teaching ID because she is projecting her own views on to others: ID may contradict her own beliefs, but teaching it will not cause great controversy for most students.

McCarthy's second assumption, that high school teachers are the final authority on what is taught, is also fundamentally flawed. Public schools are funded by tax payer dollars, and therefore those who pay taxes should have the final say about the curriculum. Teachers are important and most of the time they do great work, but when it comes to issues that are divisive to society, teachers have the obligation to educate, not indoctrinate. The people should have the final say about the curriculum.

Third, given what is taught to students in other contexts, it seems incredible to hear arguments that it is too "confrontational" to expose high school students to the arguments that life may have been started by an intelligent agent. After all, in some states 4th graders are required to take sex education. I say that exposing high school students to the testable scientific idea that humans are the result of intelligent design is no more confrontational or controversial than teaching about sex to 9-year-olds.

Finally, McCarthy is wrong to call intelligent design a mere "belief." In fact, in a contradictory fashion, she admits that ID may be "subjected to scientific criticism." If ID can be scientifically critiqued, then it can be scientifically supported, meaning that it is not mere "belief" but a testable scientific hypothesis.

McCarthy's article goes on to argue, "[S]ince critical analysis is the ongoing testing of all scientific knowledge most scientists argue that singling out one concept for such critique is not appropriate…" (FN 81) Yet at least two courts have concluded that it is acceptable to "single out" evolution or biological origins for special treatment due to the unique form of controversy these subjects can cause when taught. (See Selman v. Cobb County Board of Education, 390 F. Supp. 2d 1286 (N.D. Ga. 2005) vacated and remanded 449 F.3d 1320 (11th Cir. 2006) and Freiler v. Tangipahoa Parish Board of Education, 185 F.3d 337 (5th Cir. 1999), cert. denied, 530 U.S. 1251 (2000).) Ms. McCarthy's arguments have a weak legal basis.

Articles like this and the one by Mr. Shih make it clear that the larger scientific community would rather advocate evolutionary indoctrination than an unbiased presentation of scientific knowledge. Hopefully the next generation of law students will not fall for this threat to scientific progress.

Posted by Staff at 10:32 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

[Ed: This post was written by a legal intern at Discovery Institute who has chosen to post it anonymously.]

Immediately following the publication of "Teaching the Origins Controversy: Science, or Religion, or Speech?" in 2000 in Utah Law Review, multiple law review articles appeared opposing the constitutionality of teaching intelligent design (ID). It seems that the law review article by Professors DeWolf and DeForrest and Meyer hit a nerve that incited various law students to ardently defend the evolutionary theory they were uncritically taught in high school.

Once such student was Eric Shih, who published an article in the Michigan State Law Review in 2007 entitled, "Teaching Against the Controversy: Intelligent Design, Evolution, and the Public School Solution to the Origins Debate." Mr. Shih argues that "recent demands to 'teach the controversy' of intelligent design are nothing more than variations on the balanced tactics ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in Edwards." In other words, ID is nothing more than a mask for creationism.

Mr. Shih's attacks are misplaced and confused. First, in real-world public policy debates, proposals proposals to "teach the controversy" have explicitly opposed requirements to teach intelligent design. As Stephen C. Meyer explained in a 2002 op-ed titled "Teach the Controversy" in the Cincinnati Enquirer:

Recently, while speaking to the Ohio State Board of Education, I suggested this approach as a way forward for Ohio in its increasingly contentious dispute about how to teach theories of biological origin, and about whether or not to introduce the theory of intelligent design alongside Darwinism in the Ohio biology curriculum.

I also proposed a compromise involving three main provisions:

1) First, I suggested--speaking as an advocate of the theory of intelligent design--that Ohio not require students to know the scientific evidence and arguments for the theory of intelligent design, at least not yet.

(2) Instead, I proposed that Ohio teachers teach the scientific controversy about Darwinian evolution. Teachers should teach students about the main scientific arguments for and against Darwinian theory. And Ohio should test students for their understanding of those arguments, not for their assent to a point of view.

(3) Finally, I argued that the state board should permit, but not require, teachers to tell students about the arguments of scientists, like Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe, who advocate the competing theory of intelligent design.

(Dr. Stephen C. Meyer, "Teach the Controversy," Cincinnati Enquirer (March 30, 2002).)

It is only by shoe-horning ID into the category of "creationism" that Mr. Shih makes his argument. The article asserts that public schools could never teach ID as an alternative to evolution because that would simultaneously advance an "inherently religious belief system" and inhibit "a secular government activity for religious reasons" (FN 205). Thus he argues that science teachers are "under an ethical duty to present accurate information to their students and are relied upon to maintain accepted scientific standards" (FN 219). The article goes on to contend that "design theory poses a unique threat to the education system in that it relies almost exclusively on attacks on a secular school subject in order to advance particular religious views" (FN 221).

Again, Mr. Shih's arguments are misplaced. Design theory is not based upon religious views. Those who have fairly researched the theory will realize that it is actually a secular view that can be taught as a secular school subject alongside evolution without violating the Establishment Clause.

Yet despite the article's diametrical opposition to intelligent design, it does find a place for it in the science classroom — but only where it is presented negatively:

[Once] students learn the basic tenets of the scientific method, teachers could directly address Intelligent Design theory during discussion about the naturalistic limitations of science…for example, students could be told that theories such as Intelligent Design are not scientific because every single study conducted by a design theorist relies upon an empirically unobservable and un-testable entity to explain what is being observed. (FN 234)

The genius of Mr. Shih's plan is that it creates rules that destroy the possibility of students considering any alternate theory before a fair presentation of the facts has been rendered. Why not present ID as a theory held by a minority of the scientific community that is in the beginning stages of development, and let students decide for themselves whether evolution or ID makes more sense? The last time I checked, science is not about clinging to one view and ending the investigation.

Additionally, Mr. Shih has not made a convincing case that intelligent design contradicts the scientific method. As Discovery Institute's Intelligent Design Briefing Packet for Educators states:

The scientific method is commonly described as a four step process involving observations, hypothesis, experiments, and conclusion. ID begins with the observation that intelligent agents produce complex and specified information (CSI). Design theorists hypothesize that if a natural object was designed, it will contain high levels of CSI. Scientists then perform experimental tests upon natural objects to determine if they contain complex and specified information. One easily testable form of CSI is irreducible complexity, which can be discovered by experimentally reverse-engineering biological structures to see if they require all of their parts to function. When ID researchers find irreducible complexity in biology, they conclude that such structures were designed.

Posted by Staff at 12:04 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

Larry Moran has a post on Sandwalk excoriating Matt Nisbet for his criticism of P.Z. Myers' recent desecration of the Eucharist. Myers, a vocal Darwinist and militant atheist, obtained a Eucharistic Host, nailed it, threw it in the garbage, and photographed it, along with a Qur'an and a copy of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion.

Nisbet, sensitive to the implications of Myers' performance art, took Myers to task:

Atheists have a major image problem. There's a reason that when people ask me what I believe I have to say with a smile: "I'm an atheist...but a friendly atheist." For sure, atheists for a long time have been unfairly stereotyped in the mainstream media and in popular culture. But we also have a lot of lousy self-proclaimed spokespeople who do damage to our public image. They're usually angry, grumpy, uncharismatic male loners with a passion for attacking and ridiculing religious believers. Any fellow atheist who disagrees with their Don Imus rhetoric, they label as appeasers…These "new atheists" are the dark under belly of atheism. In books, blogs, and public statements, they sell us ideological porn, sophomoric rants that feed our dark sides and reinforce our own unfair stereotypes about the "other," i.e. the religious…Yet all of this does far more harm than good. The addictive nature of their rhetoric radicalizes us and leads us to an ever more closed off conversation about how we are superior and everyone else is delusional…

Nisbet's prudent observations were too much for Moran, who notes:

Nisbet thinks he's an expert on how to deal with the problems of religion. He just doesn't get it. Several decades of being "nice" and "friendly" toward those who believe in superstitious nonsense got us nowhere. We atheists were ignored at best, and denigrated at worst.

Myers desecrates. Nisbet is skittish, Moran's defiant. Another atheist kerfuffle — this time about the "framing" implications of spitting in the face of a billion Catholics. And Dr. Moran is a new kind of atheist: unframed and no longer "nice, friendly...ignored and denigrated". But Moran's foray into recent atheist history is, to be charitable, ill-informed. Most amusing is Moran's astonishing assertion that atheism — "nice and friendly... ignored and denigrated" — has played no substantial role in 20th century human affairs. But it has.

"Several decades" ago, 1,500,000,000 people lived under the only atheist ideology ever to come to actual long-term power. Communism — dialectical materialism, Marx’s "materialist conception of history" — was an explicitly atheist-materialist ideology brought to power by explicit atheist-materialists. The atheists in the Soviet Politburo, in the Secretariat of the People's Republic of China, and in the Kampuchean People's Representative Assembly ('Oh…those atheists!..') suffered not at all from the fetters of excessive restraint. Twentieth century atheists weren't "ignored at best, and denigrated at worst." Beginning in 1917, they were obeyed, usually involuntarily, by a third of humanity. In the few remaining atheist nations today, such as North Korea, atheists continue to make their idiosyncratic contributions to human affairs. No doubt Dr. Moran was referring to "ignored...denigrated" Canadian atheists, a domesticated colony on the atheist agar, to be sure. But the act of "ignoring and denigrating" atheists in the 20th century was, in many parts of the world, a serious mistake, made once and then regretted. Ask the Cambodians.

Of course, Dr. Moran personally shouldn’t be held accountable for the atrocities of millions of fellow atheists with whom he no doubt disagrees on many issues, just as religious believers shouldn't be held accountable for the Inquisition or for the atrocities of Al Qaeda. Accountability for one's ideological brethren— a Judeo-Christian tic— is perhaps too high a standard to apply to atheists, although we undoubtedly agree that it is a standard that, once established, is to be applied equally across the ideological spectrum.

Dr. Moran should only be held accountable for his own personal contributions to atheism's long gray line, such as his innovations in public discourse and his bragging about ruining the careers of his own students and fellow scientists if they are Christians.

Posted by Michael Egnor at 8:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Unfortunately I spent much of July at home feeling sick and miserable. For part of that time, all I could do was sit and catch up on episodes of the comedy cartoon, South Park. Before elaborating, I must first note that I don’t recommend watching South Park if you have squeamish ears or a distaste for shock humor. And if you’re a kid, ask your parents before watching it; South Park may be a cartoon but it is not intended for kids. But I confess that I find South Park quite entertaining, largely because they poke fun of all sides of controversial social, political, and scientific issues. It thus seems fitting that South Park would inspire me to blog about the Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM). In fact, the only truly appropriate way to respond to something like the Flying Spaghetti Monster is to invoke something as brilliantly absurd as the comedy of South Park.

There are Darwinists who actually think that by mentioning the "Flying Spaghetti Monster," they have made an argument. (In fact, the popularity of FSM cannot be explained apart from the fact that many of its fans view FSM as a real argument against ID.) I probably get about one e-mail per month from a Darwinist who says, "If we are going to invoke or teach ID, we might as well invoke or teach the Flying Spaghetti Monster." Has intellectual discourse stooped to such a low level? Such non-arguments deserve only one form of rebuttal: South Park.

The producers of South Park seem to understand that the Flying Spaghetti Monster is a non-argument. In rather raunchy episode titled "Go God Go" (Part 1), South Park's teacher, Mrs. Garrison, is sanctioned after she mocks evolution to her students (the episode also makes fun of Darwin-skeptics). Richard Dawkins is then brought in (in cartoon form) to teach the students about evolution. In a plot twist, Dawkins then asks Mrs. Garrison out on a date.

Unlike Dawkins, Mrs. Garrison doesn’t believe in evolution and she also believes in God. This distresses Dawkins, who during their date tries to convince her to become an atheist. Dawkins’ main argument is that believing in God is no better than believing in the Flying Spaghetti Monster, so you might as well be an atheist. While this may sound like an unfair parody, it isn’t: that’s precisely the argument Dawkins uses in his public writings:

We cannot, of course, disprove God, just as we can't disprove Thor, fairies, leprechauns and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. But, like those other fantasies that we can't disprove, we can say that God is very very improbable.

(Richard Dawkins, "Why There Almost Certainly Is No God," The Huffington Post, (October 23, 2006).)

Dawkins: "Why is someone as outspoken as you given themselves over to the whole God thing?"
Mrs. Garrison: "I'm not totally into the whole God thing, I just think you can't disprove God."
Dawkins: "Well, what if I told you there was a Flying Spaghetti Monster, would you believe it simply because it can't be disproven?"
Mrs. Garrison: "You're right. It's so simple. God is a spaghetti monster. Oh thank you. Gees. My eyes are open. Hey everyone, I'm an atheist."
Dawkins: "Really? Oh that’s wonderful!"
Mrs. Garrison: "No, I totally get it now. Evolution explains everything. There's no great mystery to life. Just evolution. And God's a spaghetti monster. Thank you Richard."
Dawkins: "You’re so welcome."
Mrs. Garrison: "Would you like to head over to my place for dessert?"

(South Park, "Go God Go" (Part 1), Season 10, Original Air Date: 11/1/06.)

The logical rebuttal to FSM is simple. FSM fans want to cast ID as an arbitrary explanation that has no logical force behind it, i.e. they argue that invoking ID is no better than invoking something as silly as the Flying Spaghetti Monster. The problem for their logic is that ID is not an arbitrary explanation, because we have much experience with intelligent agents producing the type of informational complexity we see in nature. Stephen C. Meyer, who holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy of Science from Cambridge, explains this point clearly:

[W]e have repeated experience of rational and conscious agents-in particular ourselves-generating or causing increases in complex specified information, both in the form of sequence-specific lines of code and in the form of hierarchically arranged systems of parts. … Our experience-based knowledge of information-flow confirms that systems with large amounts of specified complexity (especially codes and languages) invariably originate from an intelligent source from a mind or personal agent.

(Stephen C. Meyer, "The origin of biological information and the higher taxonomic categories," Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, Vol. 117(2):213-239 (2004).)

To invoke the Flying Spaghetti Monster is to invoke an arbitrary, silly, and unscientific cause. But in science, to invoke intelligent causation is not to invoke an arbitrary explanation. We have observation-based experience with intelligent agents which shows that they are the only known causes of high levels of specified complexity — the very type of specified complexity we find in natural structures. Using uniformitarian reasoning, a common form of scientific reasoning which invokes causes that we observe in nature that are sufficient to account for the observed data, we can use our observations about the power of intelligent agents to infer the prior action of intelligent causes. There’s nothing arbitrary about it.

Something inside me keeps saying that such logical rebuttals give far too much dignity to FSMism. Given that FSM is merely a funny non-argument in cartoon form, the only real antidote for FSMism is to expose its illogic by invoking other funny non-arguments satirized in cartoon form. So if you're a Darwinist and you still don’t get the point, then my only suggestion is this: Go watch more South Park.

Posted by Casey Luskin at 11:49 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Last year I blogged about how Newsweek science columnist Sharon Begley had promoted the multiverse hypothesis as if it were a reasonable scientific proposition, avoiding mentioning to readers that this speculative idea was invented for the purpose of avoiding the conclusion that the cosmos was intelligently designed. As I wrote, "Begley tries to steer the reader into believing the wildly speculative multiverse hypothesis--a pet philosophical favorite of materialists--while barely even hinting that the alternative, and much more elegant explanation, is intelligent design of the cosmos. For those who are informed on this subject, her article comes off as if she is trying to hide the design inference from the reader as a reasonable conclusion to explain the incredible fine-tuning of the universe." Now it seems that CalTech physicist Sean M. Carroll, in a June 2008 interview in the Los Angeles Times titled "Mysteries of time, and the multiverse," is doing precisely the same thing.

Trust the "Deep Thinker"
In the interview, Carroll promotes the "multiverse" hypothesis, but fails to mention to readers that the hypothesis was constructed in order to explain away the improbability of our universe's physical laws, which are finely-tuned to permit the existence of advanced life. The print edition of the Long Beach Press Telegram reprinted Carroll's interview, praising him as a "Deep Thinker," but Carroll actually banks on the fact that average reader -- who probably doesn't closely follow debates about the origin of the cosmos -- won't think too deeply and won't realize what he's doing. The informed reader will quickly see exactly what Carroll is doing: he's carefully avoiding mention of the alternative to the multiverse hypothesis in order to hide the reasonable alternative of cosmic design from the reader, and he's trying to explain away the origin of cosmic fine-tuning by pushing it back into other universes, realms that might spawn many other universes—the "multiverse":

The reason why you are not surprised when you open a deck of cards and it's in perfect order is not because it’s just easy and natural to find it in perfect order, it's because the deck of cards is not a closed system. It came from a bigger system in which there is a card factory somewhere that arranged it. So I think that there is a previous universe somewhere that made us and we came out. We’re part of a bigger structure.

(Sean M. Carroll quoted in "Mysteries of time, and the multiverse," by John Johnson Jr., Los Angeles Times, June 28, 2008.)

In Carroll’s analogy, the perfectly ordered deck of cards is analogous to the observation that the physical laws and constants of our universe had to be finely-tuned to an incredible degree in order for our universe to be hospitable to advanced forms of life, like you and me. But Carroll never even hints at the fine-tuning; he just speaks to the public using vague analogies about decks of cards with "perfect order." Carroll gives the average reader no inkling that lurking behind his "multiverse" hypothesis is the fact that our universe exhibits a highly improbable configuration of physical laws that allow for the existence of advanced life, and that he is, in fact, taking great pains (i.e. postulating near-infinite numbers of universes) to avoid that conclusion.

Carroll extends the analogy where the "card factory" is like the "multiverse"—a universe factory that (for no apparent reason) generates infinite numbers of universes, occasionally spitting out a universe that has the unlikely "just right" parameters to allow for the existence of advanced life. But his analogy fails on multiple levels.

First, "card factories" aren’t what ultimately arrange cards in a "perfect order." Card factories are machines that are intelligently designed, and the intelligent agents who built the card factory are truly responsible for the unlikely "perfect order" of cards in a new deck. Since a card factory is intelligently designed, when properly understood his analogy does not imply a multiverse is what produces "perfect order," but rather the analogy implies that intelligence is necessary to create such order.

Second, creating a "bigger system" (i.e. the "multiverse") doesn't actually explain away the existence of cosmic fine-tuning; it just pushes the question back. And that’s exactly what Carroll is trying to do—he's trying to explain away the existence of cosmic fine-tuning by pushing it back into a "multiverse." While Carroll is right that the deck of cards is not a "closed system," the core question is, what exists at the deeper levels of this system? At the bottom of the "perfect order," is there an intelligent agent, or are there blind material causes (like the "multiverse") all the way down?

Third, the card factory is a bad analogy because card factories (if working properly) always produce perfectly ordered and identical decks of cards. In contrast, Carroll's "multiverse" is a hypothetical idea that is supposed to produce many different universes. Here's how it is supposed to work:

If tomorrow you buy a lottery ticket and are the only winner, you will not suspect intelligent design because for every winner, there are thousands if not millions of non-winners. Somebody has to win, and if you won, then lucky you—but there's nothing about your winning ticket that cannot be explained by the laws of statistics. All other factors aside, there's no reason to infer design.

As noted, our universe has an exceedingly unlikely configuration of physical laws and constants that happen to be "just right" to allow for the existence of advanced forms of life. If there were slight deviations from our universe's cosmic architecture, life could not exist. The multiverse hypothesis is an attempt to avoid the cosmic design inference by turning the unlikely configuration of our universe's physical laws into a situation analogous to winning a lottery.

According to the multiverse hypothesis, somewhere out there are infinite or near-infinite numbers of universes, all with different configurations of their physical laws and constants. Because life can only survive in universes with an exceedingly rare set of physical laws, most universes produced by the "multiverse" are hostile towards life (in fact many universes are hostile towards the existence of matter!). But very rarely the multiverse spits out a universe that wins this cosmic lottery and has right conditions that are hospitable to life. By inventing the notion of a cosmic lottery taking place, multiverse advocates can make the origin of our universe's highly unlikely life-friendly physical laws seem less unlikely, and thus keep the design inference at bay.

But Carroll never tells the reader any of this. He never mentions cosmic fine-tuning. He never mentions the fact that the alternative to the multiverse hypothesis is intelligent design. He simply advocates the multiverse hypothesis, and only at the end of the interview does he hint that there are greater philosophical and scientific issues at stake here.

Is the "Multiverse" Science or Materialist Philosophy?
In 2006, leading cosmologists quoted in the scientific journal Nature acknowledged that "we can’t falsify the idea" of the multiverse, meaning it "isn’t science." (See Geoff Brumfiel, "Outrageous Fortune," Nature, Vol. 439:10-12 (January 5, 2006).) Carroll carefully never mentions to the reader that his entire scheme of multiverses is simply a philosophical idea concocted to avoid the much simpler conclusion that the universe was in fact designed to house life.

In the end, Carroll lets his materialist bias show through when asked about God’s role in the multiverse. Consider this excerpt from the very end of the interview:

Does God exist in a multiverse?

[Carroll:] I don’t want to give advice to people about their religious beliefs, but I do think that it’s not smart to bet against the power of science to figure out the natural world. It used to be, a thousand years ago, that if you wanted to explain why the moon moved through the sky, you needed to invoke God. And then Galileo and Newton came along and realized that there was conservation of momentum, so things tend to keep moving. Nowadays people say, "Well, you certainly can't explain the creation of the universe without invoking God," and I want to say, "Don’t bet against it."

(Sean M. Carroll quoted in "Mysteries of time, and the multiverse," by John Johnson Jr., Los Angeles Times, June 28, 2008.)

I don’t bet on people who refuse to openly disclose to the public that the main reason they construct their theories is a philosophical distaste for the simple observation that the physical laws and constants of the universe have an exceedingly unlikely and finely-tuned life-friendly configuration that implies cosmic design. Therefore, for the average reader who may not follow these debates closely but finds the "multiverse" hypothesis interesting, I have one piece of advice: Caveat emptor: It wasn’t the "power of science" that inspired the multiverse hypothesis. It was materialist philosophy.

Posted by Casey Luskin at 1:36 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

Yale neurologist Dr. Steven Novella and I have been involved in a vigorous discussion (example here) of the mind-brain problem in science and philosophy. There are real-world implications of our understanding of the mind, and nowhere are these implications more important than in the medical management of people with severe brain damage. Dr. Novella recently posted a commentary on the Terri Schiavo case. Dr. Novella’s post was prompted by a study just published in the journal Neurology that analyzes the media coverage of the affair and offers suggestions as to how experts and journalists can convey the truth of such complex cases to the public more effectively. These are laudable goals.

The crux of the matter, of course, is this: what are the facts in the Schiavo case, and, more generally, what are the real issues involved in the diagnosis of persistent vegetative state (PVS)?

Dr. Novella and I see things quite differently. I am a neurosurgeon, and I believe that the diagnosis of persistent vegetative state, in Ms. Schiavo’s case specifically and in other cases more generally, is of dubious validity. "Persistent vegetative state," defined succinctly but accurately, is the denial of subjective experience in a brain-damaged human being. PVS is the medical assertion that a human being is an object, but not a subject.

PVS is the only modern medical diagnosis that denies the personhood of a patient, and thus is fraught with logical and ethical problems. Furthermore, patients diagnosed with PVS are precisely those patients in whom discernment of awareness is most unreliable. We can never directly apprehend the thoughts of other people; we infer the thoughts of others only by their behavior. Patients with severe brain damage are precisely those people in whom expression of behavior is most impaired and in whom diagnoses based on assessment of behavior are most unreliable.

If the mind is entirely caused by the brain, the inference that a severe degree of brain damage could eliminate the mind is unexceptional. If mental causation is in part immaterial, one would approach the inference that brain damage would render a human being an object-but-not-a-subject with great caution. The materialist inference in neuroscience was very much a part of the Schiavo debate, and that inference had—and continues to have—profound ethical consequences.

In my view, the political efforts to save Ms. Schiavo’s life were well-intentioned and completely justified. I believe that many of the medical opinions offered publicly by physicians who favored withdrawal of Ms. Schiavo's hydration and nourishment were rank pseudoscience. What was done to Ms. Schiavo was an atrocity.

A detailed and thoughtful public exchange of views about the Terri Schiavo case by two experts in neurological medicine—an academic neurologist and an academic neurosurgeon who have quite different opinions on this matter—would be very informative. The discussion could take the form of detailed exchanges between Dr. Novella and me on specific aspects of the case, such as the autopsy report, the neurological exams, the nature and reliability of the diagnosis of persistent vegetative state, and the ethical and political issues involved. This discussion extends to many of the issues involving the materialist inference in neuroscience that Dr. Novella and I have debated over the past year.

I will begin in the next week or so by discussing the medical aspects of the diagnosis of persistent vegetative state.

I hope Dr. Novella will join me in this important public discussion.

Posted by Michael Egnor at 8:55 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

[Note: For a more comprehensive defense of Ben Stein's documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, please see: NCSE Exposed at NCSEExposed.org]

CSC Fellow Richard Weikart sent us his article, "'Expelled' and the Darwinism-Nazi Connection: A Response to Jeff Schloss," which is now up at the American Scientific Affiliation (ASA) website. Weikart details the historical connection between Darwin's theory and Hitler's Nazi ideology, responding to a similarly ASA-published article by Jeff Schloss.

There's a history with Schloss, which Bill Dembski explains over at Uncommon Descent. Suffice it to say that Schloss is critical of intelligent design and quick to repeat the standard objections to the connection Expelled draws between Darwin and Hitler... and Weikart doesn't let him get away with it:

In his thought-provoking review essay of "Expelled" Jeff Schloss repeatedly criticizes the film for oversimplifying complex issues. Concerning the claim in the movie that Darwinism had something to do with Nazism, he sensibly states, "This is far too serious an issue to be settled by film clips or sound bites on one side or another." Thus, it is disconcerting that Schloss--whom I know personally and count as a colleague and friend--misrepresents my views based on a sound bite in the film.

Posted by Anika Smith at 9:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

How many times have we heard the old Darwinist canard that the human eye is "poorly designed"? As the argument goes, the vertebrate eye is poorly designed because our photoreceptor cells face away from the incoming light and the optic nerve extends over them, allegedly blocking some light. William Dembski and Sean McDowell’s new book Understanding Intelligent Design has an easily accessible and forceful rebuttal to this poorly designed Darwinist objection to ID, explaining that the design of the human eye is actually quite optimal:

The photoreceptors in the human eye are oriented away from incoming light and placed behind nerves through which light must pass before reaching the photoreceptors. Why?

A visual system needs three things: speed, sensitivity, and resolution. The inverse wiring does not affect speed. Nor does it affect resolution, except for a tiny blind spot in each eye. You don’t usually notice it because your brain’s visual harmonization system easily compensates for the blind spot. You need to do special exercises to discover it.

What about sensitivity? Sensitivity requires an inverted retina. Retinal cells require the most oxygen of any cells in the human body, so they need lots of blood. But blood cells absorb light. In fact, if blood cells invade the retinal cells, irreversible blindness may result.

By facing away from the light, retinal cells can be nourished by blood vessels that do not block the light. They can still be so sensitive that they respond to a single photon, the smallest unit of light.

(William Dembski & Sean McDowell, Understanding Intelligent Design: Everything You Need to Know in Plain Language, pg. 55 (Harvest House, 2008), emphasis in original.)

According to a recent MSNBC article, the supposedly poorly designed human eye is inspiring engineers: "Borrowing one of nature's best designs, U.S. scientists have built an eye-shaped camera using standard sensor materials and say it could improve the performance of digital cameras and enhance imaging of the human body." The article reports that the "digital camera that has the size, shape and layout of a human eye" because "the curved shape greatly improves the field of vision, bringing the whole picture into focus."

And what about improving upon the human eye? The article reported that "[t]he device might even lead to the development of prosthetic devices including a bionic eye" as one scientist stated, "If you want to develop an eye to replace a human eye, certainly you want the shape to look like a human eye." While inefficiently designed objects can still be designed (ever used Outlook, the current bane of my existence?), it seems very much like the human eye is not an inefficient or poor design.

Posted by Casey Luskin at 10:47 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

It's not easy being an evolutionist these days. You have to feel a pang of pity for the critics at New Scientist, who have resorted to a new argument against intelligent design:

The more complex things are, the more we see that there's no way intelligence could have created them.

That's right — complexity is now an argument against intelligent design. From yesterday's print edition:

As Socrates knew, the really intelligent know the limits of their own ability, an idea we seem to be relearning. You might say supporters of intelligent design have it backwards: the more we observe the complex workings of our universe, the more we must conclude that no single intelligence could have created them.

Posted by Anika Smith at 7:34 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The Toronto Sun is reporting on a new poll finding that "58% of Canucks think humans evolved from less advanced life forms over millions of years, and 22% believe God created people in their present form within the last 10,000 years." The article thus proudly asserts that "[a] majority of Canadians believe in the theory of evolution." But what about those Canadians who accept the conventional geological age of the earth but are skeptical of neo-Darwinian evolution? Obviously they don’t accept the young earth creationist view, but contrary to what the pollsters and newsmedia suggest, they also might not "believe in the theory of evolution."

Or what about those Canadians who believe in some form of God-guided evolution, where God’s guidance doesn’t just mimic natural processes but involves tangible action in the real world (i.e. God didn’t use purely neo-Darwinian material processes to create life)? Again, those folks, whose views, under a scientific translation, would be quite compatible with intelligent design, are given no place in the poll.

A recent article in The Scientist proposes that "public discontent with classical evolution as an inclusive theory stems partly from an intuitive appreciation of its limits." (Eric Smith, "Before Darwin," The Scientist, June 2008:32-38.) If only pollsters would craft polls designed to measure the actual level of "public discontent with classical evolution," rather than create poll questions designed to overinflate public support for evolution by portraying many Darwin-skeptics as Darwin-proponents.

Posted by Casey Luskin at 2:01 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The Chronicle of Higher Education shows courage in publishing a non-P.C. article by Peter Wood of the National Association of Scholars that describes the real, as opposed to the putative, obstacles to increasing the number of American-born and educated scientists. Anti-intellectualism is a big part of it.

There is a problem, however, that Peter Woods overlooks, either because it doesn't occur to him or because he doesn't wish to spur the science establishment to even more outrage by mentioning it. That problem is the contemporary hostility that many committed Christian young people, and perhaps other religious youth, encounter in the sciences these days. Even those who have not experienced it become alert to it and, in turn, may be discouraged.

Darwinists can deny that this is the case, but a serious study, I submit, would show that it is so. Asked in private, when their words can't be twisted and asked in a neutral manner, many religious students report a classroom environment that demeans religious belief and demeans religious people. If it is known that they do not accept Darwinian accounts of the rise and development of life, or even the development of universe before life arose on Earth, students know that they could be graded down in some classes (a certain University of Minnesota biology class comes to mind, but it is unusual only in the professor's lack of subtlety). If they decide to seek an advanced degree the opposition will be stronger and they normally dare not express their convictions. If they somehow get a doctorate, they cannot expect a teaching position, or recommendations, once any serious dissent from Darwinism is detected. And if they secure a job they will not get tenure if word leaks out (see Expelled). Even after they have tenure they can still be maligned and harassed and even effectively demoted.

Does anyone at CHE or the National Association of Scholars wish to contest either that many religious students are aware of this situation or that it can be a disincentive for a career in science? Or that in many cases their apprehensions are well-justified? Articles can be written that pooh-pooh what I have just written. But many youth know otherwise. Anecdotal evidence perhaps, but I have talked to a number of them.

How many students might we be talking about? Probably a minority.

But possibly a big minority. It's part of the group that loves science at first, and then is turned off.

Lost in some cases to contemporary dogmatism and bigotry. A country that really cared to raise up a larger community of scientists would address it.

Posted by Bruce Chapman at 9:02 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Here's some exciting news from the UK, where 300 biologists, computer scientists, physicists, mathematicians, philosophers and social scientists from around the world have gathered "to address one of the greatest challenges in modern science: how to create a genuine artificial life form." ("Can we make software that comes to life?" Telegraph)

Despite the image of Wall-E (with the amusing caption "self-aware computers such as Pixar's Wall-E are surprisingly tricky to put together" — no, really? Every nerdy kid who ever tried to make a robot in 6th grade science camp could tell you that), the focus of the story is on evolution and — wait for it — the failure of Darwin's theory to explain complex creatures.

Using computer programs to test evolution, researchers are learning that natural selection lacks the creative power to evolve complex life — and so they're looking for answers.

Researchers thought that with more computer power, they could create more complex creatures - the richer the computer's environment, the richer the ALife that could go forth and multiply.

But these virtual landscapes have turned out to be surprisingly barren. Prof Mark Bedau of Reed College in Portland, Oregon, will argue at this week's meeting - the 11th International Conference on Artificial Life - that despite the promise that organisms could one day breed in a computer, such systems quickly run out of steam, as genetic possibilities are not open-ended but predefined. Unlike the real world, the outcome of computer evolution is built into its programming.

His conclusion? Although natural selection is necessary for life, something is missing in our understanding of how evolution produced complex creatures. By this, he doesn't mean intelligent design - the claim that only God can light the blue touch paper of life - but some other concept. "I don't know what it is, nor do I think anyone else does, contrary to the claims you hear asserted," he says. But he believes ALife will be crucial in discovering the missing mechanism.

Dr Richard Watson of Southampton University, the co-organiser of the conference, echoes his concerns. "Although Darwin gave us an essential component for the evolution of complexity, it is not a sufficient theory," he says. "There are other essential components that are missing."

One of these may be "self-organisation", which occurs when simpler units - molecules, microbes or creatures - work together using simple rules to create complex patterns and behaviour. [Emphasis added]

"Evolution on its own doesn't look like it can make the creative leaps that have occurred in the history of life," says Dr Seth Bullock, another of the conference's organisers. "It's a great process for refining, tinkering, and so on. But self-organisation is the process that is needed alongside natural selection before you get the kind of creative power that we see around us.

"Understanding how those two processes combine is the biggest challenge in biology."

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What many people observing the debate over intelligent design and evolution don't get is that intelligent design is not merely an American phenomenon. As the debate continues in every corner of the globe, design proves to be an interesting and legitimately explorable scientific concept.

Take the latest from today's Economic Times, out of India. Columnist Mukul Sharma notes writes in "Design argument and beyond":

One of the core arguments of Intelligent Design is that the fundamental constants of physics and chemistry are just right or fine-tuned to allow the universe and life as we know it to exist. They are precisely the values needed to have a universe capable of producing life.

In other words, everything in the cosmos tends toward humans, toward making life possible and sustaining it. It refutes the evolutionary biologists’ claim that we are the product of mere chance, because the universe is not so random after all; it has a beginning and was designed for human beings.

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Academic freedom doesn't protect a professor's right to talk about the scientific evidence favoring intelligent design. But it does protect a professor's right to belittle his students' fundamentalist religious beliefs. That's the hypocritical view being championed by Des Moines Register columnist Rekha Basu. Unfortunately, her mindset reflects the views of a lot of pro-Darwin apologists in the media.

When astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez was being harassed and discriminated against at Iowa State University (ISU) because of his support for intelligent design, Basu actually cheered on the inquisitors. When atheist religion professor Hector Avalos spearheaded a campus petition against intelligent design in 2005, for example, Basu wrote that “it would be would be a serious breach of academic integrity” for universities to hire intelligent design proponents. Basu even demanded that ISU impose a gag order to prevent any professor from defending intelligent design as science in ISU classrooms:

ISU can't afford to let its curriculum be polluted this way. As it is, the United States lags behind other countries because of our scientific illiteracy. Now if pseudo-science is taught as science, we're at serious risk. What's more, a state university has no business promoting religion, no matter what it's called.

There's much at stake but a simple way to handle it. The university should issue its definition of what constitutes science, and make sure faculty uphold it. (Rekha Basu, “Don't allow Intelligent Design to cloud your credibility,” The Des Moines Register, Aug. 24, 2005, 15A. Retrieved through www.newslibrary.com.)

(For the record, it should be pointed out that Guillermo Gonzalez did not teach intelligent design in his classes. His crime was conducting research about intelligent design and speaking publicly in favor of the theory. But contrary to Basu, Gonzalez certainly should have had the right to discuss the scientific evidence favoring intelligent design in relevant classes.)

When ISU denied tenure to Gonzalez in 2007, Basu was at it again. This time she downplayed the idea that anything wrong had happened and even seemed to justify the university’s failure to provide information about what had happened: “To demand that a university open its personnel files to the public requires evidence of something improper, which hasn't been demonstrated.” While grudgingly conceding that “professors are entitled to their own beliefs,” Basu insisted that “Intelligent Design proponents are wrong to equate the exclusion of their theory from the classroom with academic bias. Professors are… not [entitled] to teach as science something that is not.” (Rekha Basu, “Bias over views or credentials,” The Des Moines Register, May 20, 2007, 30P. Retrieved through www.newslibrary.com.)

So according to Basu’s cribbed version of academic freedom, a university has the right to impose an outright ban on the presentation of ideas in the classroom with which it disagrees.

Or not. It turns out that Basu’s advocacy for university gag orders depends entirely on what ideas are being banned. Yesterday Basu published a histrionic article warning that America was veering toward “theocracy.” Her case in point? Iowa community college professor Steve Bitterman, who she claims was fired because he told “his students not to take the story of Adam and Eve too literally.”

But wait: I thought that according to Basu, a university has the perfect right to impose a gag order banning the presentation of ideas it doesn't like (e.g., intelligent design). Indeed, in 2005 Basu insisted that such a gag order wasn’t even “an academic-freedom issue.”

That was then; this is now.

According to Basu in 2008, preventing Professor Bitterman from talking about his views on Adam and Eve (in a history class, by the way, not a religion class) was a fundamental breach not only of his rights, but of the rights of students:

It's not just Steve Bitterman's right to employment that was undermined; it's also the students' freedom to hear different theories.

That’s strange. When Basu advocated imposing a gag order on professors at ISU who might defend intelligent design, she wasn’t the least bit concerned about “the students’ freedom to hear different theories.”

I’m willing to be more consistent than Basu. I agree that Prof. Bitterman shouldn’t have been fired from his community college simply for expressing his views about Adam and Eve—if that’s what really happened.

But the nice thing about being a Darwinist is that apparently you never have to be consistent. Academic freedom and free inquiry aren’t basic principles that apply to everyone; they apply only to the chosen few, and only to promote views with which the Darwinists agree.

Of course, what’s interesting in the Bitterman case is that the facts seem a little different than Basu’s neatly redacted version. Most importantly, the original complaint against Bitterman was filed by a female student who was reduced to tears by Bitterman’s treatment of her after she disagreed with him in class. Bitterman belittled the student and told her she should be on Prozac.

Even Bitterman says that he “can be a little acerbic at times, I don't deny that.”

So does Basu think that academic freedom includes bullying and belittling your students?

Let’s see if I understand her argument: Universities have the affirmative duty to ban professors from speaking favorably about intelligent design in their classrooms, and such a ban wouldn’t violate academic freedom in any way. Nor would such a ban undermine “students' freedom to hear different theories” challenging the tenets of Darwinian fundamentalism. But universities do violate academic freedom in Basu’s view when they discipline someone who may have treated his students abusively, and when they don’t allow students to hear “different theories” challenging the students’ fundamentalist religious beliefs about Adam and Eve.

Apparently no double-standard is too large for Darwin-defenders in the media like Basu.

Posted by John West at 11:43 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Over the past couple years, Tiktaalik, a fossil allegedly documenting parts of the transition from fish to tetrapods, has become a new celebrated icon of evolution. PBS's "Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial" documentary featured Tiktaalik as their premier transitional fossil, an anachronism since it wasn’t even reported until months AFTER the Dover trial concluded. The NAS's recent "Science, Evolution, and Creationism" booklet also prominently pushes Tiktaalik, calling it "a notable transitional form." Darwinists have a lot of rhetorical capital invested in this fossil, and it thus comes as no surprise that they are quick to defend it with the "zero-concession policy" vehemence we’ve come to expect from internet Darwinists. As William Dembski writes regarding this policy:

Our critics have, in effect, adopted a zero-concession policy toward intelligent design. According to this policy, absolutely nothing is to be conceded to intelligent design and its proponents. It is therefore futile to hope for concessions from critics. This is especially difficult for novices to accept. A bright young novice to this debate comes along, makes an otherwise persuasive argument, and finds it immediately shot down. Substantive objections are bypassed. Irrelevancies are stressed. Tables are turned. Misrepresentations abound. One’s competence and expertise are belittled. The novice comes back, reframes the argument, clarifies key points, attempts to answer objections, and encounters the same treatment. The problem is not with the argument but with the context of discourse in which the argument is made. The solution, therefore, is to change the context of discourse.

Hardcore critics who’ve adopted a zero-concession policy toward intelligent design are still worth engaging, but we need to control the terms of engagement. Whenever I engage them, the farthest thing from my mind is to convert them, to win them over, to appeal to their good will, to make my cause seem reasonable in their eyes. We need to set wishful thinking firmly to one side. The point is not to induce a cognitive shift in our critics, but instead to clarify our arguments, to address weaknesses in our own position, to identify areas requiring further work and study, and, perhaps most significantly, to appeal to the undecided middle that is watching this debate and trying to sort through the issues.

(William Dembski, "Dealing with the Backlash Against Intelligent Design" (April 14, 2004).)

Traipsing Into Tetrapod Evolution
Darwinists haven’t always been so eager to walk into the field of the fish-to-tetrapod transition. Barbara Stahl's 1985 treatise Vertebrate History: Problems in Evolution admits that "the fossil material provides no evidence of other aspects of the transformation from fish to tetrapod." (pg. 195) 21 years later, Daeschler, Shubin, and Jenkins admitted in Nature that "the origin of major tetrapod features has remained obscure for lack of fossils that document the sequence of evolutionary changes." (Daeschler et al., "A Devonian tetrapod-like fish and the evolution of the tetrapod body plan," Nature, Vol. 440:757-763 (April 6, 2006).) Authority Jennifer Clack even admits that before finding Tiktaalik, the morphological gap between fish and tetrapods was "frustratingly wide":

It has long been clear that limbed vertebrates (tetrapods) evolved from osteolepiform lobefinned fishes, but until recently the morphological gap between the two groups remained frustratingly wide. The gap was bounded at the top by primitive Devonian tetrapods such as Ichthyostega and Acanthostega from Greenland, and at the bottom by Panderichthys, a tetrapod-like predatory fish...

(Jennifer A. Clack & Per Erik Ahlberg, "A firm step from water to land," Nature, Vol. 440:747-749 (April 6, 2006), internal citations omitted.)

Panderichthys possesses relatively few tetrapod synapomorphies, and provides only partial insight into the origin of major features of the skull, limbs and axial skeleton of early tetrapods. In view of the morphological gap between elpistostegalian fish and tetrapods, the phylogenetic framework for the immediate sister group of tetrapods has been incomplete and our understanding of major anatomical transformations at the fish-tetrapod transition has remained limited.

(Edward B. Daeschler, Neil H. Shubin, and Farish A. Jenkins, "A Devonian tetrapod-like fish and the evolution of the tetrapod body plan," Nature, Vol. 440:757-763 (April 6, 2006).)

I recently wrote a critique of claims from Darwinian paleontologists that Tiktaalik has a "wrist." In my post, I made two main arguments: (1) First, I argued that Neil Shubin, one of the lead paleontologists who reported on Tiktaalik had failed to identify precisely which bones in Tiktaalik's limb were homologous to the bones of the true "wrist" of tetrapods. (2) However, I also argued that the bone structure in Tiktaalik's fin so different from the bone structure in a tetrapod wrist that it is inappropriate to claim that Tiktaalik has a "wrist." Based upon a response by Carl Zimmer, Shubin did apparently identify two bones in Tiktaalik’s fin that are specifically claimed to be homologous to two bones in the tetrapod wrist: the intermedium and the ulnare. I suppose I was misled because Shubin's book Your Inner Fish says that Tiktaalik has a "wrist," yet it describes a tetrapod wrist as having "lotsa blobs," and thus I was expecting that no one would claim that Tiktaalik had a “wrist” unless it had a "lotsa blobs" conglomeration of wrist-bones--not only two "wrist" bones, which is apparently all that is claimed for Tiktaalik.

So it turns out that I was wrong about point (1). But I absolutely stand by my substantive claims in point (2) that the bone structure in Tiktaalik’s fin is highly different from the bone structure in a tetrapod wrist, such that only a overactive evolutionary imagination would claim that Tiktaalik has a "wrist." I can admit my mistake on point (1) — something that Zimmer is not known for doing: Shubin did try to directly match two of Tiktaalik’s bones to the wrist-bones of tetrapods. That still leaves the open the fundamental, core question: Is it appropriate to claim that Tiktaalik has a "wrist"?

Is it appropriate to claim that Tiktaalik has a "wrist"?
Zimmer claims that "Shubin and his colleagues offer a detailed analysis in their paper of how the intermedium and ulnare in Tiktaalik are homologous to the bones of the same name in tetrapod wrists." Upon closer analysis, Shubin’s reasons are obvious enough: in tetrapods with true wrists, the ulna articulates two wrist-bones, the intermedium and the ulnare. In Tiktaalik, the bone that Shubin calls the "ulna" likewise articulates two bones, which he also calls the intermedium and the ulnare. Unfortunately for Zimmer and Shubin, that’s about where the bone-structure similarities between Tiktaalik’s fin and tetrapod limbs end. The tetrapod wrist is much more than the intermedium and the ulnare.

Zimmer points us to read Kardong’s treatise Vertebrates: Comparative Anatomy, Function, Evolution to learn about the intermedium and ulnare, and tetrapod wrist anatomy. After waiting a week or so to receive my copy, I too would like to refer readers to this textbook’s description of the tetrapod wrist, which makes for a nice comparison to Tiktaalik:

In the manus [the end portion of a tetrapod forelimb], a digit consists of several phalanges with a metacarpal at its base. In turn, each of the five metacarpals articulates with a carpal. The wrist bones that articulate with the radius and ulna are, respectively, the radiale and the ulnare. The intermedium lies between these two wrist bones. Within the middle of the wrist are one to three centrales.

(Kenneth Kardong, Vertebrates: Comparative Anatomy, Function, Evolution, pg. 332 (2001, McGraw-Hill, Third Edition).)

Although these small distal bones bear some resemblance to tetrapod digits in terms of their function and range of movement, they are still very much components of a fin. There remains a large morphological gap between them and digits as seen in, for example, Acanthostega: if the digits evolved from these distal bones, the process must have involved considerable developmental repatterning.

(Ahlberg & Clack, "A firm step from water to land," Nature, Vol. 440:747-749 (2006).)

A "wrist" is comprised of the carpal bones. If Kardong is correct to state that "metacarpals articulat[e] with a carpal," then given that Tiktaalik had no metacarpals, it would seem that only someone with an overactive evolutionary imagination could find carpals without any metacarpals. Nonetheless, Shubin names two bones in Tiktaalik with the names of two tetrapod carpal bones: the intermedium and ulnare. So under the most charitable interpretation, Tiktaalik only has two "carpal" bones--the intermedium and ulnare--even though a typical tetrapod wrist will have many more carpal bones. In fact, according to Kardong, the generalized wrist of a “primitive tetrapod” has no fewer than 13 carpal bones (see pg. 334). That's a lot different than two.

How did the rest of the wrist-bones of primitive tetrapods evolve?
To give an idea of just how different Tiktaalik’s fin is from the wrist of a "primitive tetrapod," here are just a few of the changes that would be necessary to evolve Tiktaalik's fin into a real wrist:

1. Shrink Tiktaalik's radius and reposition it so that it articulates other bones further down the limb.
   
2. Evolve a radiale.
   
3. Dramatically repattern, reposition, and transform the existing radials by lining them up, separating them out to form digits.
   
4. Evolve metacarpals and phalanges so that there are real digits extending distally from the radius.
   
5. Evolve the "lotsa blobs," i.e. evolve other carpal bones between the radius, ulna, and the now-aligned digits to form a real wrist. In other words, evolve the bulk of the wrist-bones.

To be fair to Shubin, at one point he does admit that Tiktaalik’s so-called "wrist" merely "presages the establishment of a functional proximal carpal joint." As I noted in my previous post, the dictionary definition of presage is:

1. something that foreshadows or portends a future event : omen
2. an intuition or feeling of what is going to happen in the future

If Tiktaalik's fin functioned like a "wrist," would that confer much of an advantage?
Some Darwinists have claimed that Tiktaalik is transitional between because it was a fish that was capable of propping itself up using its "wrist" fin. Is that a uniquely transitional trait? In fact, there are living fish which can prop themselves up by their fins, and no one considers them transitional. As seen in a recent CNN video, "It's Raining Fish," catfish are perfectly capable of both propping themselves up by their fins and fish-flopping around on the land. (See the picture above of flop-walking catfish, or watch the video.)

Such observations not only make Tiktaalik's "push-up" abilities a bit less impressive, but they show the great difficulty that fish have propping themselves up using fins. There are good anatomical reasons for these difficulties. Barbara Stahl again provides insight about the difficulties faced by a fish that tries to prop itself up for any significant amounts of time:

I. I. Schmalhausen points out that a fish lying on its side on the ground bears the weight of the body wall upon its viscera despite the presence of ventral ribs. When the internal organs are compressed in this way, the fish can force air through the pharynx only with great difficulty. For air to pass easily into the lungs, the trunk has to be propped up so that the respiratory organs hang suspended in the body cavity. A rhipistidian fish could have used its muscular fins to life its body from the surface temporarily, but in the absence of legs the body would have dragged or flopped when the animal moved. Although there might have been a rhipistidian that could expend the large amounts of energy necessary to make the lungs work under these conditions, a form with a fish-like trunk would have been better adapted for living on land if the body was kept clear of the ground.

(Barbara J. Stahl, Vertebrate History: Problems in Evolution, pg. 201 (Dover Publications, 1985).)

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